An energy conservation group is currently running an advertising campaign urging people to turn off computers, printers, photocopiers, fax machines, and so forth in their workplaces. It's all very well, but I wonder has the person in question ever used one of the printers of which they speak.
In my experience, you see, the normal response of a large printer to being turned on is to, first of all, print half a tree worth of meaningless diagnostics. It will then decide that it only wants to talk to clients via AppleTalk or something similarly unused, and, probably, that it has a paper jam, real or imagined. Lights of unclear purpose, always previously green, will turn orange or red. Error codes may appear. Manipulation of buttons helpfully labelled things like 'XTRN' and 'ZNFQ' may be required. Almost inevitably, the printer will decide that it would prefer that the next few hundred jobs be printed double-sided, in incorrect aspect, on US Letter, a paper size particularly beloved of printers.
And that is to say nothing of the print server, which has probably sat, unregarded and unchanged, since the printer was installed. In an older office, it probably runs Windows for Workgroups or something. It won't be impressed.
I know little of the waking habits of photocopiers, but I do know that the more modern variety of office phone, and presumably by extension fax machine, is inclined to be unhappy when power-cycled, and will spend a while hunting for IP addresses or similar.
As for computers, well, I have this image of a well-meaning person who has seen an ad, in a server-room. Urgh.
Saving energy is all very well, but it is not worth being eaten by a printer for. They are subtle, and quick to print a thousand pages of random ASCII characters.
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