The Printer From ‘Office Space’ Did Nothing Wrong. It Probably Wasn’t Even Broken.
If you clicked on this article, we’re probably already on the same page about the film and scene I’m talking about. Office Space is a 1999 dark office comedy film, the first live-action film by indie animator Mike Judge that satirizes corporate interpersonal politics of the 90s. It’s an eminently quotable film with some of the most iconic scenes in comedy film history.
The scene in question is the outcome of a movie-length running gag regarding a printer that is constantly jamming and destroying the steadily increasing number of reports the office workers are expected to turn in every day. It’s a bit of mounting slice-of-life tension that boils over into a scene where they drag the printer out into a field and destroy it in the style of a mobster hit. This was apparently inspired by the printer Mike Judge was using while writing and developing Beavis And Butthead Do America, and the fantasies he had begun to develop about destroying it when production was done.
Besides being a funny and cathartic scene, it was also very experimental and controversial and took some maneuvering to even get in the movie in the form we saw. The studio was not happy with the music, and they had to put together a special focus group to keep it. Most of it the acting was improvised, and they went through about twenty different identical printers to film it.
So with all that, what if I told you that this was unnecessary? That these men not only murdered what was essentially a co-worker in cold blood, but that co-worker was also completely innocent?
You would probably say “Who cares? It is a scene in a movie; I see films where imaginary people are killed for no reason, why would I care about an imaginary printer?” And I would say “Well why did you click on this then? This is clearly the entire premise of the article.” And then you would say “I’m just trying to kill some time here on my lunch break or on the toilet or whatever.” and then I would say “Well hey, you are already about 350 words into this. I’m writing the article, not you. Lets just both get this over with.” And you will say “Fine; there’s not enough time in my toilet/lunch break to read something else.” And then I will say “Are you sure you meant to phrase it like that?” And you will say “You just said you are the one writing this.”
Ah, right. So anyway, the printer in the office and the printer in the beatdown scene aren’t even actually the same printer.
And obviously, tracking down the exact model is going to be a bit dodgy, because people making low-budget films are going to do everything in their power to obscure any branding from showing up for both legal and licensing reasons. But at least the printer in the beatdown scene is probably a Samsung model, either the Samsung SLB-3108H or a Samsung Finale.
There’s a problem here, however. “PC LOAD LETTER” isn’t a Samsung error message, it’s a Hewlett-Packard error message. By all accounts, the story about David Herman (as Michael Bolton) improvising the “PC LOAD LETTER” line instead of the scripted dialog is true. But the actual error message still could have come from notes from Mike Judge about his old printer, which could have conceivably been a HP Laserjet model, a contemporary of the Samsung printers in the film.
If you want to get a better idea of what the error message means, you can find the documentation for those printers on the Internet Archive.
Essentially what it comes down to is that the printer is expecting one size paper, but sensors in the mechanism that pushes the paper through the printer is detecting another. There are a few common types of office paper, but the main ones are typically “letter” (8.5" x 11"), “A4” (8.27" x 11.7") and “legal” (8.5" x 14"). They’re all pretty close in size, but with a mechanical device as precise as a printer, which is expected to pull one single page off a stack of paper in a cartridge, deliver it through the printer at the correct speed and then deposit it in a second tray, minuscule fractions of an inch change the game entirely.
Even if the Office Space clowns weren’t trying to jam the wrong size paper through it (but that’s not off the table), there’s plenty of factors that could affect the ability of the device to move paper through it. Static electricity, the weather (paper is basically just wood, which constantly changes shape based on temperature and moisture), or not completely clearing out the paper cartridge after a jam (which you never see them do) will all contribute to future paper jams. And not accounting for any them would absolutely be their fault. Not the printers.
Not to mention the possibility that they grabbed the wrong printer for the beatdown scene. In any case, they coldly murdered a co-worker that was just doing what it was told, suffering through the same job they were, but they are supposed to be the good guys.
You know I’m right.
