Tatum Hunter reporting for The Washington Post:

Three grown men against one printer wasn’t a fair fight. But Armando Islas and his friends didn’t care. The three gathered around a defunct HP printer, brandishing giant hammers and standing in the smashed-up remnants of dead electronics.

Islas and two classmates were celebrating the end of their law school exams at Bay Area Smash Room, a basement unit where customers pay $120 or more to break stuff for 30 minutes. Smashing the printer would feel good, they said, like revenge on the shoddy campus printers that plagued them through the past six semesters of graduate school.

That sort of rage against the machine has spawned an entire industry. Across the United States, customers can book sessions at a smash rooms and pay anything from dozens to hundreds of dollars to smash dishes, furniture and — most of all — printers.

Who would ever think a scene from the cult Mike Judge movie “Office Space,” in which frustrated office workers take a printer to a field and smash it to pieces with baseball bats, could be turned into a lucrative business model known as smash rooms. Since 2016 or so, smash rooms have provided a space where regular people can live their “Office Space” fantasies.