Ink-redible idiocy or deliberately printing money?

A minor gripe inducing piece of stupidity occurred to me today as I was sat, working away like a good little boy on my essay rather than heading outside into the sunshine which has decided to grace us and bake the interior of the library. I was tapping away at the slightly tacky keyboard as you do and decided to print out what I had of my essay so that I could hand write the links required and refine my argument somewhere away from a computer screen. I can't think when I'm staring at one, not a bit. And it was hot. Really hot.

It then occurred to me I might not have enough printer credits to print off all three pages as I needed to. With this worry in mind, I realised that for every page someone cannot print in the library, in what has to be the most cost effective move since Noah building the ark out of sponges, the printer will print a page with huge black font all over it telling me I can't print. The ink and paper I would have paid to use, and couldn't pay to us, have now been wasted. And we wonder why we're paying a stupid amount to print things. Because they regularly print warnings "for free" using more ink than I'd have used in the first place, and then tack the wasted paper and ink onto the price for what you actually use.



I mean, how hard can it be to set it so that if you haven't got enough, a pop up window will let you know? They've programmed the network to throw up that fecking Message Of The Day pop up whenever you log on, which no one reads. Put some effort into a little "no credit" pop up. Or, better yet, give me a book of HTML or whatever programming language is used and I'll have a stab at it. I'd need a week, a pot of coffee and lots of food, but by buggeration would I get it done.

Oh, and stop programming the network to let absolute wankers lock their computers so they can walk away and the only person who can sign in is them. That's exactly the sort of thing that exacerbates the attempts of a few to stop dickheads from hogging workstations. Divert the energy and time put into changing the settings to allow people to annoy everyone to death into removing this stupid money making scheme. Thankyou.