This past weekend was a catch up on the many admin tasks put aside while we were out of town for most of January. One of those catch up activities is to scan and shred documents. I moved to electronic storage for copies of bills and invoices about ten years ago and managed to retire and remove a full four-drawer filing cabinet.

Despite this, and having multiple backups, both on a physical hard drive and in the cloud, I still keep hard copies of some documents – contracts, and the final versions of manuscripts spring to mind immediately.

As you’re probably suspecting, there was quite a pile of paper to scan, and as I got through the pile, the Epson printer/scanner barfed. That’s not unusual as pages get caught and jammed every so often. This was different though. There was no paper jam icon. Instead I had an Epson error 100069 and a message telling me to restart the printer. Easy enough, and for good measure, I checked nothing was caught in the scanner feed.

Restarting went straight to the same error message and a suggestion to contact Epson technical support. So straight to the browser and a search, and a discovery.

There is nothing on the Epson site that acknowledges printer error messages, let alone a list of what they might be, and how to resolve them. Buried deep in the results of another search I found the title Epson’s triple secret error codes. Now that seemed promising.

And it was.

The 100069 message essentially means the scanning function has serious issues. It could be the scanner motor pulley (checked it and looked okay), or a failed scanner motor or scanner sensor or . . . Given the amount of scanning I do, my guess is it’s the sensor or motor, which almost certainly means a new printer.

I don’t begrudge the cost of the new printer (actually, yes I do 🙂 ). What does frustrate me is how hard it was to diagnose the problem. I love the printer, and will replace like with like, but come on Epson, you’re better than this.