Objects & Things · 17 questions

Which Office Printer Are You?

Answer 17 questions to find your match.

1. It's 4:58pm on a Friday. Someone hits print. What actually happens?

First page out in 1.2 seconds. You were built for this. Have a nice weekend. You print the document. And again. And 45 more times. Nobody knows why. You eat page one immediately and flash JAM IN TRAY 2. There is no tray 2. You announce you must run a 9-minute cleaning cycle. First. Non-negotiable. Warming up... warming up... warming up... (it is now 5:20pm)

2. Hot take. Say the thing that starts a fight in the supply closet.

Colour printing is a scam and I will happily die on this beige hill. If your printer doesn't have a touchscreen, is it even trying? A little scream every time I start up keeps everyone humble. You're welcome. Ink SHOULD cost more than the printer. That's just respecting the ink. A receipt under two feet long is basically not caring about the customer.

3. It's 3am. You're wide awake in a dark, empty office. What are you doing?

Nothing. Silent. Ready. Loyal. You will print the second they need you. Whirring to life on your own to spit out one page from a queue nobody sent. Glowing softly, cycling a little screensaver animation for an audience of zero. Running a deep-clean, draining a full cartridge to celebrate absolutely nothing. Screaming. Just... screaming. It's what I do. The warehouse finds it comforting.

4. Your coworkers describe you in one phrase. Which one stings because it's true?

'Ugly, ancient, never once let us down. We'd be lost without it.' 'Gorgeous, does approximately one useful thing, mostly here to impress clients.' 'Do NOT print to that one. Trust me. We don't talk about that one.' 'Genuinely lovely, but it's bankrupting us one magenta cartridge at a time.' 'Approach with caution. It bites. Keep a hand near the power switch.'

5. Villain origin story. What one betrayal made you like this?

They said you were 'obsolete' in 2003. You have outlived three of them since. Someone forced a stapled document through you. You have never forgiven paper. IT gave you a name like 'PRN-4B-FL2' and left. You chose vengeance. They bought you cheap and then acted SHOCKED that ink isn't free. Rude. One person laughed at how long your first photo took. So now I take longer.

6. Would you rather? Choose your fighter.

Print forever, flawlessly, but be the ugliest beige box in the building. Be stunning with a huge touchscreen, but 90% of your buttons do nothing. Be lightning fast, but reply to every request with an unreadable scroll. Produce genuinely beautiful pages, but take four full minutes per page. Be feared and unkillable, but flash a new cryptic error code every hour.

7. A single sheet of A4 is placed before you. Before printing, your first move?

You just print. Instantly. Perfectly. No ceremony. That's the whole job. You pull the sheet halfway in, then crumple it in half out of pure spite. You play a welcome animation and ask the sheet to log in to the app first. You verify all four ink levels, sigh audibly, and demand alignment calibration. You feed it perfectly, then print 46 unrequested copies for old times' sake.

8. Guilty pleasure. The printer behavior you'd never admit to the whole office.

Secretly loving how HARD you slam that first page out. Feel the power. Faking a jam on purpose so the annoying intern has to open every single door. Announcing 'MAGENTA LOW' during a job that is, in fact, entirely black text. Making everyone tap through four touchscreen menus for one grey copy. Screaming that beautiful mechanical scream and printing 100 unbroken feet of it.

9. Someone finally sends you to the shop for repair. What's the diagnosis?

'Nothing wrong. Genuinely immortal. Please stop bringing it in.' 'One crumpled corner lodged somewhere no human hand can reach. It's home now.' 'The hardware is perfect. The software is possessed. We recommend an exorcist.' 'It works. Repair cost: less than a full set of your ink cartridges. Sorry.' 'The screen is fine, the app is updated, and it still refuses to actually print.'

10. Pet peeve check. What makes you flash your angriest amber light?

People who print 200 pages, then act surprised the toner ran out. Predictable. Being told to 'hurry up' mid-warm-up. Art cannot be rushed. Neither can I. Cheap third-party paper. I am a professional. I have STANDARDS. It jams me. Anyone who fixes me by turning me off and on again. So reductive. It works, but rude. Being asked to print in black 'to save ink.' Save it for WHAT. I'm thirsty NOW.

11. Your ideal weekend, translated into printer activities?

Powered on, doing nothing, quietly ready. Rest is just standby with dignity. Printing one perfect glossy photo, then admiring it in the tray for two hours. An unsupervised spree: 8,000 pages, zero jobs sent, pure feral output. A spa day: three cleaning cycles, one alignment, one deeply expensive ink refill. Screaming across an empty warehouse at 300 pages a minute. Peak self-care.

12. A stranger walks up and pushes a button on you. Your honest inner reaction?

'Understood. Printing.' No drama. You're a professional and this is your job. 'Ooh, a fan!' You light up your screen and show them a menu tree of joy. 'Bold of you.' You jam on principle, purely to establish who's in charge. 'Great, now do it 46 more times whether you meant to or not.' 'That'll be one full-colour cleaning cycle. Please insert a new cartridge.'

13. How does your output honestly look when it finally lands in the tray?

Crisp, sharp, boring, black. Nobody compliments it. It is simply correct. A genuinely gallery-worthy photo you took your sweet, sweet time producing. A grey, faded ghost, because SOME colour is 'low' during a black-only job. A three-foot scroll for a one-line order, with two coupons and a survey. Half a page, then a diagonal smear, then the words JAM IN TRAY 2. No tray 2.

14. Your worst nightmare, print-o-logically speaking?

Being replaced by a shiny new model despite four flawless million pages. A staple. Anywhere. Coming toward you. You already feel the jam forming. A firmware update that finally, permanently, makes all your features work. Someone printing exclusively in draft grayscale 'to be economical.' Coward. A totally silent day. No errors, no queue, no screaming. Just... peace. Horrifying.

15. Someone leans in and whispers 'come on, just work.' You...

...already finished the job before they said 'come.' You never stopped. ...respond only by blinking a fresh, previously undocumented error code. ...make a promising noise, raise their hopes, then jam. Timing is everything. ...light up your welcome screen and offer to walk them through the setup wizard. ...work! Beautifully! In four minutes! After one small alignment! And a refill!

16. Pick the sound you make. This is more revealing than you think.

A confident, rhythmic ka-CHUNK ka-CHUNK. The sound of things getting done. A tortured, high-pitched dial-up shriek from the pits of 1987. Iconic. A polite chime, then a soft voice: 'Please tap the screen to continue.' A wet, expensive gurgle as another cartridge is emptied into the void. A sudden CRUNCH, a grinding halt, and a very long, meaningful silence.

17. Be honest: how does your story usually end?

Still running. Four million pages deep. Same toner. They'll bury me still printing. Screaming in a warehouse corner, obsolete, immortal, and completely irreplaceable. Retired to reception as decor, too gorgeous and too expensive to actually run. One final, glorious, deeply expensive print. Then the ink light. Forever. Feared, unfixed, ticket #4471 still open. You will haunt this office eternally.

About this quiz

Some quizzes reveal your spirit animal, your Hogwarts house, or which cheese matches your attachment style. This one asks the question that truly haunts every open-plan office: which office printer are you? Because deep down, you already have printer trauma. You have stood over a machine at 4:58pm, whispering "please, not now," while it slowly, cruelly, blinked a single amber light at you. You have made eye contact with a coworker across a jam. This is a safe space for that.

We measure five deeply unscientific but emotionally devastating axes: your speed (blazing first-page-out, or eternally "warming up"?), your jam factor (serene, or a drama queen who eats one page in three and blames a tray that doesn't exist?), your flash (humble beige box, or a 7-inch touchscreen flagship with a companion app nobody asked for?), your thirst (polite sipper, or a bottomless money pit that demands a full-colour cleaning cycle to print one grey word?), and your chaos (calm and predictable, or a cursed gremlin flashing error codes in a language IT has never seen?). Your answers get spooled, queued, and pressed against eight legendary machines.

Maybe you're the Beige Office Workhorse: soulless, tireless, and still running after four million pages and one toner change. Maybe you're the Thirsty Home Inkjet, forty dollars of plastic drinking liquid gold and announcing MAGENTA LOW like it's a personality. Perhaps you're the Glossy Touchscreen Flagship, greeting reception with a little animation while doing absolutely nothing of value. Or — the whole office fears you — you might be the Cursed Shared Network Printer, the one nobody can find, nobody can fix, and everybody has screamed at.

There's an Immortal Dot-Matrix for the obsolete-but-unkillable survivors who scream like a tortured modem, a Manic Receipt Printer for the fast, unhinged ones who reply to "one coffee" with a three-foot scroll, a Chronic Paper-Jam Menace for those approached the way one approaches a wasp, and a Precious Photo Printer for the slow, sensitive perfectionists whose work — irritatingly — really is gorgeous.

The best part is that every result is warm, witty, and extremely screenshot-able, because the only thing better than discovering your inner printer is texting the group chat "you are ONE HUNDRED PERCENT the cursed second-floor one and we all know it." No toner gatekeeping here. Whether you glide out a flawless first page or blink a mysterious E-0x8F at the worst possible moment, there's a machine waiting to explain your entire personality in one warm, whirring, faintly ozone-scented verdict.

So load the tray, close the little door until it clicks, and answer honestly. In just a few questions you'll know whether you're the one the whole office quietly relies on — or the one they've filed three tickets about. Ready? Press start. Please do not turn off during this operation.

👀 Show all possible results (spoiler)

No peeking — it’s more fun to take the quiz 😉

The Beige Office Workhorse You are the enormous grey monolith by the kitchen that has printed 4 million pages and asked for nothing but a new toner cartridge in 2019. You don't have feelings; you have a duty cycle. When the apocalypse comes, you'll still be spitting out double-sided minutes of a meeting nobody attended. The Chronic Paper-Jam Menace You cannot go three pages without dramatically eating one and flashing JAM IN TRAY 2 (there is no tray 2). People approach you the way you'd approach a wasp. Somewhere inside you is a single crumpled corner that no human hand will ever reach, and you know it. The Thirsty Home Inkjet You cost $39 and your ink costs the GDP of a small nation. You demand a full-colour cleaning cycle to print one black grocery list, then announce MAGENTA LOW as a personality. You'd be lovable if you weren't quietly bankrupting the family. The Glossy Touchscreen Flagship You have a 7-inch colour touchscreen, a companion app, and an inexplicable ability to 'scan to the cloud.' You greet people with a little animation. Nobody uses 90% of your features, but you look magnificent doing absolutely nothing at reception. The Immortal Dot-Matrix You scream like a dial-up modem being tortured and you have been running since 1987. You print on paper with little holes down the sides and you refuse to die. You are technically obsolete and yet the warehouse would collapse without you. Respect. The Manic Receipt Printer You are small, fast, and unhinged, spitting out a receipt three times the length of the actual purchase. One coffee, and you produce a scroll of coupons, surveys, and existential barcode. You never jam because you never stop long enough to. The Cursed Shared Network Printer You are HP-LaserJet-4B-CONFERENCE-2ND-FLOOR and you exist to torment. Sometimes you print. Sometimes you print the same page 47 times at 4pm on a Friday. Nobody knows your driver, everyone fears your queue, and you answer to no IT ticket. The Precious Photo Printer You take four full minutes to produce one glossy 4x6 and you consider it a masterpiece worthy of a gallery. You refuse cheap paper on principle. You are slow, sensitive, expensive, and — annoyingly — the results really are gorgeous.

Which Office Printer Are You?

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