Mobile technology allows us to carry round astonishing levels of computing power and communication ability, and use them wherever and whenever we want. Yet there’s one item from the office environment that doesn’t yet have a viable mobile equivalent, and that’s the printer. At this point I know some of you will be asking “What about the paperless office”, but I’m sure that by now most of us realise that that’s simply never going to happen. It was first promised decades ago, and yet we still often need to print out various things. Have you ever bought something on an e-commerce site and not been presented with the final “we suggest you print this page”?
Most business printers are networked these days. And many employees will have a VPN connection back to their office. So the easy solution is that while out and about you simply print to your office (or indeed home) printer. It’s a simple enough solution, and usually works very well.
However, there is a potential gotcha. Although this remote printing works well during the day, I’ve seen several cases reported where someone has printed out something at night and it has set off the office burglar alarm. I’m not sure whether this is single sheets appearing in a printer tray causing this, or one of those instances where a large document causes a paper tray to fill and start scattering pages all over the floor.
Either way, there are two solutions: either site your printer in a location which isn’t ‘seen’ by the alarm sensors, or else get your alarm company to swap the PIRs for ‘pet friendly’ alternatives. They might tell you that you’re bonkers for wanting pet-proof sensors in an office, but I’ve discovered that these sensors are also A4 paper proof!
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