Yes all paper is usually letter. It's close to A4, so you don't usually need to reformat documents to print on one or the other. Most printers take A4 and US letter and adapt automatically.
A4 is readily available in the US but not commonly used.
The main problem is that if you cut it in half, you get a really silly sizes (too narrow) instead of A5.
> if you work in tech, you must know how to fix printers, right?
You kid, but it turns out the assumption was correct in this case. I suppose the truth is that by working in tech, you are likely very methodical and rely on deduction, which are both essential in fixing printer issues.
Yes, but that’s the annoying part. So many tech problems that people encounter can be trivially solved with a quick web search, poking at menus until you find something promising, or a combination thereof. I remember helping my mom over the phone to troubleshoot something on her iPhone – at the time, I had an Android, so everything was foreign to me, but I was able to deduce where a given setting might exist, and figured out whatever the problem was.
I don’t know when or why this skill declined, but it’s upsetting.
> Most printers take A4 and US letter and adapt automatically
I found out that they do not automatically adapt to JIS sizes. My wife’s work once had a printer that somehow got configured to use JIS, I assume JB5. It then refused to print on US Letter, but as printers are wont to do, didn’t produce any useful error message, nor relay this information to the computer. It just wouldn’t print. I only discovered this (because if you work in tech, you must know how to fix printers, right?) by laboriously scrolling through every menu on the tiny LCD screen, and finding that the paper settings were incorrect.