...but nearly as annoying as the common cold...
As I was printing out some important work-related documents, my laser printer (that Brother HL-5250DN I bought a while back) ceased functioning, all its LEDs angrily ablink.
Cycling power got it to wake up, illuminate its happy light, begin accepting data, and maybe print a page or so before going to angry lights again.
According to the manual:
What I have here is a Main PCB failure. Yikes!
Except... isn't that the sort of thing that turns up during power-on self-test, and not later, after printing a couple of pages?
After considerable futzing around (and a nasty bruise upon the knee), I've developed a powerful suspicion that a document in the queue was causing the firmware to crash, and the trap handler declares a hardware failure, on the assumption that the firmware Just Wouldn't Do That Sort Of Thing (stack overflow, wild pointer, watchdog timeout, whatever).
So, rather than an actual hardware failure, I believe what I have is a buggy PDF file causing the buggy Acrobat reader to generate buggy Postscript, causing the printer's buggy BR-Script interpreter to flake out.
Whew!
Good thing I didn't really, urgently need hardcopy of that particular datasheet anyway.
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