Printer problems are nothing new — if any of us hit "print" right now, there's a good chance something would go wrong. So when a customer we'd previously helped with more complex problems called to say their printer had stopped working, it didn't seem unusual at first. What we found, however, was anything but ordinary.
We arrived around an hour later, as the customer was due to go on holiday and urgently needed to print some documents. We worked through all the usual checks: restarting the printer, reinstalling drivers, trying it from another device, and checking for paper jams. Nothing helped. The printer wouldn't even photocopy — a function that doesn't involve a PC at all — and paper was drawing through slowly during diagnostics before stopping altogether. Every diagnostic came back clean, which made the fault all the more puzzling.
With the printer only six months old, we suspected a hardware fault and decided to contact HP directly, aiming for the quickest route to a replacement.
That call turned out to be the key. HP printers come with a free trial of HP Instant Ink, which this customer had signed up for. They believed they'd cancelled it, but the subscription had quietly continued. When their card details changed, a payment was missed — and with just £3.06 outstanding on the account, HP had remotely put the printer into "brick mode," disabling it entirely.
After working through some login issues on the HP account, we updated the payment details, settled the small balance, and cancelled the Instant Ink subscription for good.
Printer functionality was restored immediately, the holiday documents were printed in time, and the customer avoided a last-minute scramble the day before their trip. A reminder that sometimes the smallest unpaid balance can disable an entire device — and that the fix can be far simpler than a hardware replacement.
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