Printer Celebrates 10th Anniversary of Never Working Correctly

A Boise, Idaho man held a small, bitter ceremony Tuesday to mark the 10th anniversary of his HP LaserJet Pro M402n's unbroken streak of not working correctly. Kevin Tray, 41, purchased the printer in February 2016 and reports that it has not once completed a print job without incident. Over the past decade, the device has displayed every error message in its firmware, invented several new ones, and on three occasions printed documents in a language Tray does not speak and HP cannot identify. 'I just wanted to print a boarding pass,' Tray said, recounting the device's inaugural malfunction. 'It told me it was offline. It was plugged in. It was turned on. The light was green. But it was offline. That was day one. We have not progressed.' The printer's most common behavior, according to Tray's meticulous log, is declaring itself offline while visibly powered on (1,847 occurrences), followed by demanding new ink cartridges immediately after installation of new ink cartridges (1,203 occurrences), and printing the first page of a document correctly before 'going rogue' on subsequent pages (892 occurrences). The most memorable incident occurred in 2021, when the printer spontaneously produced 340 copies of a single page from a PDF Tray had not opened, did not recognize, and appears to have been authored in the 1990s. 'I don't know where it got that document,' Tray said. 'I've never seen it before. It was a lease agreement for a property in Delaware. I've never been to Delaware. The printer has never been to Delaware. And yet.' HP's customer service, which Tray has contacted 47 times over the decade, has consistently recommended that he 'try uninstalling and reinstalling the driver,' a solution that has never worked but that the company delivers with unfailing confidence. Tray marked the anniversary by placing a small candle next to the printer. The printer responded by displaying 'Paper Jam in Tray 2,' despite Tray 2 being empty.