I'm a guy who thinks he "knows where he is in life". Mid-thirties, settled, career on track... you know the type. I pride myself on many things. I consider myself intelligent, reasonably well-educated, and good with technical subjects.

Because of my job as a network system administrator, one of my biggest pet peeves is users who call in and complain about something that's really their fault. You know, the coffee-cup-in-the-CD-ROM-tray types. The ones who don't remove disk two before inserting disk three. I even write songs making fun of them.

Today, I met the enemy, and he is me.

It's the day after Christmas, and I'm printing out pictures. I took photos of the family at the Grandparent's house on Christmas day, and some of them came out really good, so I'm printing them with my fancy photo printer on the fancy photo paper. You know, the expensive stuff, the kind where the paper costs more than the printer.

But I'm thhhmart. Yup. I don't print on the expensive stuff right away, no. I have some midrange stuff, some glossy paper that's cheaper than the high-end stuff. I use the cheaper stuff to test the size, cropping, and gamma first. Once the picture looks right on the cheap stuff, then I do a final print on the expensive stuff. Been doing this for a long time, now, and it's always worked well.

When you change the paper in the printer, you also change the "paper" setting in the printer driver software. The printer driver tells the printer just how much ink to put on the paper, to compensate for the different amounts of "wicking" that's built into each kind of paper. And the midrange glossy paper, compared to the expensive glossy paper, has two different specific settings in the printer driver.

So I get things looking right on the cheaper paper, drop a sheet of the pricey stuff in, change the printer driver to "Photo Paper Pro", and fire away.

The resulting print is not at all what I expected. It's in "simulate an illustration" mode. You know what I mean: Everything looks like it was painted with a watercolor brush. Now, it just so happens that this printer driver has this as one of its setting options. You can select, in the printer driver, a little checkbox to simulate an illustration, and it will print this way. Note that I'm talking about the printer driver itself, not the photo-editing software. They actually have an option for this right in the driver.

But I checked the driver and the "simulate illustration" checkbox was not checked. Hmph, I'm sure there's a bug in the driver. The software is behaving as if the checkbox is checked. It must have done it when I chose the different paper setting. Something buggy about the communication between the driver and the dialog box UI. Or perhaps it's because the printer driver on the print server is a different version than the one on my local PC. Or something like that.

I mess with it a few times and manage to waste a few more sheets of the expensive stuff in the process. I'm at the end of my rope. It's time to do what we sysadmins dread the most: call for backup.

So I call up Canon tech support. The lady on the other end of the line is very friendly and helpful. She talks me through a bunch of stuff, including reinstalling the drivers, as well as unplugging the printer from the print server and instead plugging it directly into the PC to rule out driver problems on the print server.

We print several test pages on plain paper with various print settings, and I can't get it to fail now. All seems well, and I chalk up the bug to FM. (She asked what FM was, too. My explanation is always: "The M stands for Magic.")

She says, "hey, before you plug it back in to the print server, print one final page on the good paper". Sure, okay, I wanted to get a good print anyway (the whole point of this exercise), so I do.

And it comes out as a watercolor illustration.

But this time, all I did was put the better paper into the printer. I didn't even touch the driver. And it was working just mere moments ago on the cheaper paper. My first thought is that the printer somehow detects the type of paper plugged into it, but I'd already confirmed that this wasn't the case.

Then she says, "you're not putting the paper into the printer upside-down, are you?"

You can just shoot me now.