Printer says "NO"!.........

I've just spent the entire morning trying to persuade my printer (with which I've had a really good-natured, trusting relationship up till now) to print a multi-page double sided document.

It will happily print off all of the single sided sheets but when I collate and reload them for printing the second side, it gets part way through, spits out a half-printed sheet and starts again.

FROM THE BEGINNING!

This has resulted in about 50 wasted sheets of high quality paper this morning, as the printer interface has no way to enable me to pick up printing where it left off, so I have loads of half-printed sheets, some single sided, some double sided and no possibility of filling in the blanks.

I am SO FRUSTRATED I could spit.

I've tried all the usual stuff.  Switching the printer off and on again.  Switching my laptop off and on again.  Closing down the document and re-opening it.  Re-installing printer drivers. Plugging it into a different USB port.

All to no avail.

I've been onto the Canon support site and submitted a help request, which they assure me will be answered with 5 days.

FIVE DAYS!

I need that document printed NOW.

There is one manual solution to the problem but it will take me ages to set up, and what's the bloody point of having a printer that can't print more than a few sheets before having a mental breakdown?  Or giving me one.

*heartfelt sigh*

So, the low-tech solution is that I will have to take the document and instead of having a single 20 page booklet file, I will have to split it into groups of 4 pages.  This might sound like a dawdle but trust me.... it isn't, as I will have to get all the double sided page numbers in exactly the right order.  For example, the first sheet will have page numbers 1 and 20 on one side, and 2 and 19 on the other.  I will then have to ensure that I print them all out in the right order and get each sheet loaded in exactly the right way.  I will also have to do 5 separate printing runs instead of each one and hover over the printer every step of the way to identify and deal with problems as they arise.

The potential for chaos is epic. 

Just one page in the wrong printing order and it will all go spectacularly wrong and very possibly result in the printer being heaved out through the window.  My patience is stretched exceedingly thin at the moment anyway, so having to do all this additional messing about is not helping my equilibrium one bit.....