Printer madness

Over the past 20 years that I've been fooling with Personal Computers, I've had various mysterious hairballs hurled at me by printers.
Usually I could work around these hairballs, although reams of paper often got wasted doing so.
It's gotten so printing is pretty reliable.
I use a photo-quality inkjet printer. Always have.
But last night (Tuesday, May 4, 2010) really strange unexplainable mysteries were occurring.
I had a fairly large printing job to do, 36 pages. Three printouts of 12-page documents.
The printer ran out of paper at 28 pages, so stopped; red alarm-light on.
I loaded more paper and clicked “resume.”
It thereafter printed page 8, then page 7, then page 6, all pages that had previously printed, but in descending order, all the way down to page 1.
Then it started page 8 again, but stalled about two-thirds of the way.
Start over. Delete print-job, and pull out stalled paper.
More for our shredder.
Okay, print the final printout from the beginning, but first at least six blank pages rifled through the printer.
What's going on here?
Is it ever gonna stop spitting blank pages?
What prompted that?
I've been told printers are mysterious beasts; they seem to have a mind of their own.
Okay, printer set-up.
I've given up resizing printer files.
I just print 8&1/2 by 11, as long as I can get my output in the right spot on a strange paper size.
Like envelopes, which aren't 8&1/2 by 11.
I also was printing an Internet document, which I'm told is tempting fate.
What usually happened is if I could get it on the screen, my printer could print it; although apparently it wasn't “print-screen.”
But why would it print in descending order when it usually prints in ascending order?
And why did it print pages I'd already printed?
And most of all, why did it spit out six blank pages first?
I had deleted the previous print-job.
Sometimes the paper misfeeds, and it cranks out a blank page.
But not this time.