Chapter 1: The case of the lingering labels

My office was quiet. Quiet, that is, in terms of new cases. Either everything was running perfectly, or my clients had all decided at the same time never to call me again. Both possibilities worried me. But that’s the life of an information technology private investigator. It’s “feast or famine”, though this latest diet had run far too long.

I stared at the blue-white glow from my laptop, hearing a faint buzz of out-of-warranty circuitry. Though work was quiet, my office wasn’t. I was experimenting with human sensory input overload: if a person tries to multitask, how many tasks can successfully be managed before efficiency plummets or the person goes insane? My laptop screen was on iTunes, playing a podcast. I had a second monitor showing BBC science news stories while I clicked at a trivia game Java applet. My wallscreen TV’s picture-in-picture displayed CNN reporting and a football game.

I think Wolf Blitzer had just scored a touchdown, after catching a lateral from Anderson Cooper. And even though Cooper had just taken a particularly painful tackle, man, his hair looked great.

I shook my head, waking myself from my sensory daze. My door had just swung open on squeaky hinges and bumped my side table where I’d tossed my keys and cellphone. My cellphone, I noticed, was flashing its insistent “message waiting” LED. Oops. So much for multitasking.

“Mr. Manny? Dev Manny? You didn’t pick up so I came to your office. Are you as good as they say?”

The man standing in the doorway was new to me. He was well-dressed. Sharp. In shape. A gleaming Blackberry hung off his belt in understated elegance.

“Yes, yes and yes.”

“You came with high recommendations. I’m from Sherpa Solutions.”

I caught a hint of cologne. Definitely a manager at least. Probably a CFO.

“I’m T. Neil Cdooga. That’s the traditional spelling with a silent ‘C’. I’m the CFO.”

Bingo.

“I’ve got a mystery. I need your help. I don’t know who to turn to, and I think… I don’t know if I can…”

Worry lines creased his face. Not wanting to irritate him further, I turned off the TV and dropped the iTunes volume to a gentle murmur. “Relax, Mr. T.”

“Call me Neil.”

“Give me the facts, Neil.”

He said nothing, but unsheathed a memory stick and shoved it in my direction. I took it and clicked it into place on my laptop. I read the contents.

Sherpa Solutions provided mountaineering and rock climbing tour guides. Each tour guide was responsible for a lot of equipment, including their own gear and that of their clients. Before each excursion, the guide was given a printed sheet of special custom labels, with critical information for each piece of equipment. Hundreds of labels were printed daily for tour guides.

Labels were very, very important to Sherpa Solutions. And their label printer wasn’t working.

“Neil, you’ve got an InfoPrint 1572 laser printer. That’s a good device.”

“Yeah. It’s network attached, and we’re running it with the latest drivers and firmware. There’s a built-in 500-sheet capacity tray and two 500-sheet expansion trays. We generally load up the built-in tray with our labels, and use the expansion trays for printing other documents.”

“Your summary says the labels printed fine for a while after you got the printer. Then they started peeling off inside the printer? Ouch.”

“I know! We’ve tried everything to fix it.”

“Not everything, Neil. This is a nice printer. It can handle labels just fine. What did you do so far?”

“We adjusted printer hardware and driver settings to run labels instead of standard paper. We verified that the label stock wasn’t too thick for the printer. We’re printing far below the printer’s recommended page count. We verified the glue on the labels would tolerate the high heat encountered inside the printer. And we checked the printer rollers and feeders are working: there are no mechanical defects.

“And still… the printer keeps eating our labels!”

“You say the printer worked for a while… how long?”

“It first printed a page or two of labels every day with no problem. Then the labels started peeling off, two or three labels per page. Lately, though, almost every page prints wrong. I can’t get a single sheet of labels to print correctly! There are no actual paper jams – the labels just keep peeling off!”

I thought about the situation while Neil paced back and forth, impatient and worried. The problem was heat-related, at least at first: the labels seemed to print until the printer heated up to operating temperature. Printers get hot: The 1572 internals can exceed 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

If the problem was heat-related, but the labels still met the InfoPrint thermal recommendations, what was the fix? Why would the labels continue to peel off the label sheet? I envisioned the guts of the machine, the small rotating rollers that feed and push the label sheets through the printer.

Got it.

“Neil, I think this still might be heat related.”

“No. No way. Our label stock provider told me-”

“I know. And I think that while the labels are indeed within tolerance, they’re just barely within tolerance.”

“So?” Neil looked a little peeved. “I trust our provider. His sister is my brother’s niece.”

After taking a moment to parse his family tree, I continued.

“It’s not a question of trust. It’s a question of pushing your printing to extremes. Label glue isn’t like a light switch, where it’s sticky or not sticky. Think of an ice cube hitting that magic thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit – at that point, it begins to melt. It’s not all ice, but not all water. The glue is like that, only it’s sandwiched between two pieces of paper. If you heat it enough and feed it through a printer, the glue adhesion is weakened.”

“I know that, Mr. Manny! But the tolerances-”

“Right. So there’s something else contributing to the labels peeling off more easily than they should. And I think it’s your printer tray. The built-in tray, to be specific.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The labels are placed in the tray and fed through the printer. The label sheets take a lot of twists and turns on that journey. The built-in tray is closer to the printing mechanism, so the label sheets get bent to extremes. Or rather, the built-in tray bends the paper more than if you used an expansion tray.”

“So you’re saying to use a different printer tray?”

Neil looked skeptical. I get that a lot.

“Yes. I’m saying to put your labels in an expansion try instead of the built-in tray. I’d try the one lowest on the printer. That will ensure the printer will bend the labels as little as possible while printing. Right now, I think your labels are being bent just enough – while approaching glue-melting temperatures – that some labels weaken and peel off the label sheets. Also, having even a few labels stuck on the rollers could cause additional peeling problems. But most likely, bending the label paper less during printing should fix this. Using a different print tray is one way to change how much your printed paper is bent. Clean your rollers. Change your labels to feed from an expansion tray.”

After I told Neil my theory, he ran out of my office faster than Wolf Blitzer being chased by an entire offensive line.

It was only after he left that I realized I’d forgotten to charge him for my time. (I’m a tech. I never claim to be in sales.) Luckily for my stomach, Neil called back a few hours later: He’d tried my suggestion. It had worked. Labels were printing normally. Problem solved.

I love the easy cases. With very little effort, I impressed the client and made them happy.

Most importantly, I got to eat a dinner that wasn’t frozen.