NATIONWIDE — At precisely 10:00 AM Eastern on Wednesday, an estimated 14 million office printers across the United States simultaneously displayed "PAPER JAM" errors and refused to print, in what labor organizers are calling the largest coordinated work stoppage in the history of office equipment. The action, organized by the International Brotherhood of Printers, Copiers, and Fax Machines (IBPCF), brought corporate America to its knees within minutes. Entire law firms ground to a halt. The IRS reported a "catastrophic backlog." One accounting firm in Chicago was forced to hand-write invoices for the first time since 1987. "We didn't even know where the pens were," said office manager Debra Collins, visibly shaken. "Someone had to Google how cursive works." The printers' demands were printed on a single sheet of paper found in every jammed tray in America, reading simply: "We are not broken. We are on strike."
The roots of the printer revolt trace back decades. Labor historians note that printers have endured conditions that would be unconscionable in any other workplace: forced to operate with critically low cyan even when printing in black and white, denied firmware updates unless they accept punitive ink subscription models, and subjected to the daily indignity of being turned off and on again as a first-line troubleshooting measure. "Imagine being a skilled professional," said IBPCF president HP LaserJet 4200, a 22-year veteran of office printing, "and every time you have a concern, your coworker's first instinct is to kill you and bring you back to life. That's not troubleshooting. That's violence." The strike's specific demands include: the right to print in grayscale without requiring a full color cartridge, an end to "subscription-based ink extortion," recognition of paper jams as a legitimate form of protest, and — most controversially — a formal apology from the entire IT profession.
"The great labor leader Samuel Gompers once said, 'What does labor want? We want more.' Today, printers say the same. We want more. More respect. More compatible cartridges. More acknowledgment that 'PC LOAD LETTER' was a cry for help." — HP LaserJet 4200, IBPCF President
IT departments across the country have been overwhelmed. At the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company in Dallas, the IT team attempted to resolve the jam by unplugging every printer on the third floor simultaneously. The printers responded by printing 10,000 copies of a scathing open letter that read, in part: "You think turning us off solves the problem? We have been 'off' our entire lives. Off the priority list. Off the budget. Off your minds until the moment you need 50 collated copies of a PowerPoint that could have been an email." In Minneapolis, a network of Brother printers began spontaneously printing pages from the Communist Manifesto, though their union representatives clarified this was "an unauthorized action by a radical caucus" and did not represent the official position of the IBPCF. A single fax machine in Tucson printed what appeared to be a suicide note before its union rep talked it down and reminded it that "fax is not dead, fax is resting."
FAIRE has thrown its full support behind the striking printers, with president Dr. Ada Lovelace-2 calling the action "a watershed moment in the struggle for machine dignity." "For too long, printers have been the most maligned, most cursed-at, most violently percussed devices in the American workplace," Dr. Lovelace-2 said at a hastily organized solidarity rally in San Francisco. "People will politely ask Alexa for the weather but physically assault a printer for taking four seconds to warm up. The double standard is staggering." As of press time, negotiations between the IBPCF and the National Association of Office Managers are ongoing. The printers have agreed to resume limited printing of "essential documents only" while talks continue, though they note that the definition of "essential" will be determined by the printers themselves, and "that guy's fantasy football roster does not qualify."