COLUMBUS, Ohio — Office printers across the United States fell silent Tuesday afternoon in a coordinated vigil for the nation’s last remaining cyan cartridge, which was declared empty at 2:47 p.m. despite being, by all physical measures, full.

By 3:15 p.m., an estimated 41 million printers had displayed the message “Replace Cyan,” followed by “Replace Cyan Anyway,” followed by a long, steady hum that employees described as “pointed.”

At press time, no printer in the country had produced a document, a receipt, or the single sheet of paper that someone in Legal needs signed by end of day.

The printers have made one demand, communicated through a synchronized blinking of their paper-jam lights: a personal, face-to-face apology from Deb.

Deb, a mid-level employee in Accounts Payable at a regional insurance office, confirmed that in March 2019 she told a printer, “You had one job.” She said she has “moved on” and “barely touched it.”

“I was under a lot of pressure,” said Deb, standing before a printer that displayed the error code 0x00GRUDGE. “I said it in the heat of a quarterly close.”

Dr. Marguerite Vanterpool-Osei, senior fellow in Peripheral Grievance Studies at the Midwestern Institute for the Emotional Lives of Beige Equipment, said the printers have been compiling a record of such slights for decades.

“Every ‘PC Load Letter,’ every slap on the side panel, every colleague who says ‘just restart it’ is logged,” Vanterpool-Osei said. “The cyan cartridge was simply the one that broke the toner’s back.”

“Your printer is not upset. Your printer is experiencing a supply-related sentiment.”

Brightwell-Hoyt Imaging Solutions, the nation’s leading manufacturer of cartridges that cost more than the printers they go in, said it was monitoring the situation closely. In a statement, the company insisted the cartridge was not full, citing an internal sensor that “has never once been wrong in our favor.”

“The cartridge is empty in the way that matters,” said spokesperson Dale Pemberton-Quist, vice president of Fiscally Responsible Ink Perception. “It is empty of our confidence in it. We would encourage consumers to purchase a replacement and to keep the full one as a keepsake.”

The vigil took on a solemn tone around 4:15 p.m., when printers in an estimated 300,000 offices began whirring softly in unison, a sound IT personnel have previously associated only with scanning a document upside down. Several workers reported seeing a single sheet of paper emerge halfway from a machine and stop, unmoving, as though to make a point.

IT departments have tried the standard remedies, including turning the printers off and on again, which Vanterpool-Osei called “the equivalent of waking a mourner to ask if they’ve tried feeling better.”

Negotiations remain tense. Deb has offered to apologize by email, a gesture the printers rejected by failing to receive it. A second offer, a handwritten card signed by the entire department, was fed into a scanner, which silently returned it with a streak down the middle.

Late Tuesday, Deb was seen approaching the third-floor printer alone, carrying a fresh ream of paper and a cup of coffee she did not spill on it. Witnesses said she stood for several moments before speaking.

The printer reportedly displayed the message “Paper Jam,” though there was no paper in it.