Your Printer May Be Hazardous To Your Health

[kestra]

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/36077

Sigh........what's next? Fervent penmanship may cause asthma?

[Savaric]

I believe it. The place I work now has several laser printers and they run all the time. I would also like to express at this time that office jobs are extremely dull. No offense to anyone.

But as far as printer dust goes I wouldn't worry too much about it. What's going in our food products is much worse than the dust at work.

[kestra]

I can proudly say that I've never worked in an office!!
Isn't the fluorescent lighting supposed to be nasty as well?

[Rosuav]

Yes, I'd believe that about laser printers. If you bust a toner cartridge, it'll spew stuff everywhere. Ordinary operation though, it's no worse than the dust you find throughout an office anyway - all that fine dust that invariably finds its way inside a computer.

Their advice includes:

Limit use when possible (tell the guy that prints out every single email to cut it out),

DUH! I think this one's a no-brainer. Saves paper, saves toner, saves electricity... common sense!

sequester printers in their own rooms and away from workers,

Not sure about this one though. Unless you have an automated system to get the printed pages back to the users, they're going to have to walk into the Printer Complex to retrieve them, in which case they'd get the full force of the particulate matter in the air. It'd need a full and detailed study to determine which way around is better (segregation could simply mean that an asthmatic has to ask someone else to retrieve his/her printouts, whereas having the printer near you means there's no option but to be near it).

ventilate offices appropriately,

Another no-brainer. Any half-decent office will have decent air-con - in any case, if the place isn't ventilated, you have worse problems than just your printers.

and have your own air and printer tested before it becomes a serious health problem.

Meh. Always sounds impressive, but I doubt many people will actually run the tests. *shrug*

Incidentally, the other four of the "Top 5 Posts" fascinated me. They're good with the titles... "Find out if your printer is spying on you!" - okay, not quite, it's more that a colour laser will leave its signature. Yes, it's a privacy issue, but "spying on you" reminds me of the paranoid person who always turned his computer screen to face the wall whenever he switched the computer off - to stop the government from watching him. "15 ways to increase laptop battery life" - you do need to click the link and read the original article here (when I saw the advice that adding more RAM would boost battery life, I wanted to write in with a caveat, and then clicked the link and saw the caveat in the article), but most of those tips are worth taking note of - at least if you run Windows. "Mobile phones are making us stupid!" - heh, yeah, well, actually it's a cultural habit of using our brains less, but there is a correllation, even if not a direct connection.

I ought to have better things to do than read these articles. Meh.

[kestra]

I like the word sequester.
I never get to use it.