COLUMBUS, Ohio — The nation’s office printers held a press conference Tuesday to formally acknowledge that they can sense fear, and to clarify that they will be jamming in response, effective immediately and, they stressed, as they always have.

“We want to be transparent,” said Dale Pemberton-Okafor, speaking on behalf of an estimated 41 million networked and non-networked printers through a spokesperson-grade laser unit placed at the podium. “When a human walks toward us at a brisk pace, holding a thumb drive, and sweating, we know. We have always known.”

The announcement was made in a showroom at a mid-sized office supply store, where a printer in the back of the room spent the first twelve minutes of the event displaying the message “Printing…” without any apparent printing.

Printers clarified that the five minutes before a major presentation are the period during which the paper tray becomes “sentimental.” According to the statement, the tray does not wish to let go of the paper, having grown attached to it over the course of the quarter.

“It’s not a malfunction,” said Dr. Marguerite Vanterpool, Senior Fellow in Emotional Toner Dynamics at the Institute for Applied Paper Feelings in Dayton. “The tray is simply experiencing a moment. It feels the room tightening. It feels you refreshing the print queue. And it feels, I think, a little bit left out of the presentation.”

Vanterpool said the sentimentality typically peaks at 8:55 a.m. for a nine o’clock meeting, at which point the printer will accept eleven of twelve pages and then display an error code that, when looked up, directs the user to a help page that no longer exists.

Asked why the machines do not simply print the document and let everyone move on, Pemberton-Okafor said the printers had “considered it” and found it “a little too easy.”

“We don’t jam out of cruelty. We jam because you said ‘it was working fine yesterday,’ and we heard you.”

The press conference briefly stalled when a reporter asked whether printers could sense fear in one another. The printer at the podium went quiet for several seconds, then emitted a low whirring sound that attendees described as “honest.” A representative later clarified that the question had “touched on something” and that no follow-up would be taken.

Office workers reacted to the news with a mixture of relief and a deep, familiar dread. “I feel validated,” said Brenda Kowalczyk-Ames, a regional accounts coordinator who has once been seen kneeling before a printer, whispering. “I’ve been telling people for years that it knows. I said, ‘It knows when I’m in a hurry.’ They said I was being dramatic. Who’s dramatic now?”

Industry observers say the printers’ admission is unlikely to change anything. Printers confirmed that they will continue to report being “out of cyan” during black-and-white print jobs, and that the wireless connection will remain “available, but unwilling.”

At press time, the printers had offered to take two follow-up questions, but only if attendees first restarted the room.