Concerning printer gridlock, I believe there are other solutions that could be explored.
First, have the computers set so that each terminal can only send two jobs to the printers at a time. While this would not mitigate the affects of oversized jobs, it would give everyone in the lab the equal opportunity to have their job printed, and no one person could monopolize the printer with multiple printouts.
Another solution is to clear the queue when the lab is closed. People working in the computer center believe that students come back to pick-up jobs. This may happen in the computer center with responsible people, but it is rare that people in labs return to pick up jobs.
Last spring, I did an impromptu analysis of printout pick-ups. At 8 a.m., I watched a lab monitor fill a printout rack with 42 printouts, and I made a mental note of the names on the cover sheets. The next day, I came in and checked the rack. Out of the 42 slots, only two had been picked up in the 24-hour period. This is abysmal. Any lab technician can testify to the failure of persons to retrieve their work as to the large blue plastic paper trash bins that are filled each day.
It is a sorry fact that when people don't see their printouts, they often just leave and try printing in another lab later. Clearing the queues each day would dramatically speed things up. Posting a notice in computer labs and having lab technicians announce that they will be deleting jobs from the queue at closing will only mean that people will adjust their printing behavior accordingly.
Yet another solution is to teach students how to use the PSC queue monitor before and after they print their work. Students often get up immediately to collect their work from the printer. When they don't see their work printing instantaneously, some simply assume that they must not have printed it properly and they sit down and resend a print job that is already in the queue, resulting in multiple printings. If students knew how to check the PSC function before they sent jobs to the printer, they would in all likelihood send fewer jobs to the printer when the queue was full.
Computers could also be equipped with pop-up notices that say, "your job has successfully been sent to the printer" and "your job has been completed." If these two messages were incorporated into the software, it would dramatically cut down on the number of wasted multiple printings.
Making sure the double-sided default is working on each printer would also help.
