Do you ever get a big sigh when you ask your IT staff for help? Don’t take it personally, chances it’s the piece of technology you’re working with that causes the angst. While no authoritative studies have been published, anecdotal evidence points to a few components that take a disproportionate amount of time to support. In other words, these are the things that IT folks hate to work on.

First on the list are printers and their siblings from another mother, the all-in-one device. While printers are fine for their basic function, i.e., putting ink or toner onto a piece of paper, it’s the more technical functions that are often not reliable. Network printing in general, and wireless printing in particular, are notoriously unreliable. “My printer disappeared” or “I sent the job to the printer but it never printed” are comments we get often and simply abhor.

From the all-in-one side, the old “I scanned a document, but it didn’t show up on my computer (or in my email)” is a related common complaint.

One of the problems with printer support is that many, if not most, IT folks don’t print much, and actually take that as a source of pride. Printing is so “last century.” Contrast this with, say Outlook, and it’s like night and day. IT folks live on Outlook and are intimately familiar with it.

But it certainly appears that printer manufacturers simply care more about selling toner and ink than ensuring technical adequacy. After all, the profit in printing does not come from the actual printer itself, it’s in the “official vendor approved” toner or ink that these creatures consume. With many businesses and government agencies using consumer-grade printers, the unreliability of the devices is exacerbated.

Another technology that gives us pause is Bluetooth. Headphones, soundbars and printers (cough) are all notorious for losing their connection at the most inopportune times. This is likely due to the cheap nature of many of these products such as headphones … and we do mean cheap, in every sense of the word. “Enterprise grade” and Bluetooth are never mentioned in the same sentence, unless there’s a “not” in there. Again, most Bluetooth devices are consumer-grade, which explains their fickleness.

Finally (for now), older versions of software drive us nuts. While the advent of SaaS has helped to alleviate this issue, many folks still use versions of software that are no longer supported. When issues arise with these applications, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to remediate. Many IT support folks simply won’t support old software.

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John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. He can be reached at jagsalud@live.com.