Light bulbs and printers...
I recently got mugged into family-IT support for a printer, as another and reasonably IT-savvy sibling had tried and bounced hard when it came to getting this thing into the home wireless network.
A great deal of the problem stemmed from the fact that said device was designed by the same people who make industrial boilers: there's just two lights and two buttons on the front, and all configuration is done through various combinations of holding the buttons down for a few seconds.
Theoretically at least. In practice, none of the combos listed in the manual worked; whatever you tried, the lights would blink in a pattern not listed in the manual and then go back to blithely ignoring you.
I ended up having to go to a shop to buy a USB cable, dig an ancient laptop out of storage, in the hope that there would be some sort of config app included with the drivers. This required a reboot, at which point Windows cheerfully decided to go into update mode - and as the laptop hadnt been used for a year and is woefully underspec'd (4gb/32gb ssd chromebook wannabe), this took over an hour.
Thankfully, when I then ran the driver install, it detected the printer and installed a firmware upgrade (which to my suspicious mind may indicate that it was just fundamentally broken out of the box). And it even offered to clone the laptop's network config over to the printer via usb...
And so, the problem was resolved. It just took about three hours longer than it should have!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
