I would like to take a moment to complain about printers. Printers are lovely and wonderful devices when they work. But sometimes they have problems which make me want to pull my hair out.
1. Our really old HP printer--the faithful standby--has been leaking ink. So my parents decided to get rid of it. It's in the garage right now waiting to go to the proper place of disposal.
2. The all-in-one Lexmark printer/scanner/copier, which came free with my laptop just last year, and which guzzles the most expensive ink cartridges on the planet at an alarming rate, stopped working, for no apparent reason, last month. No one has been able to fix it. Now it's just a decoration.
3. The wireless HP all-in-one photo printer that my parents got for Christmas and just set up last week, will no longer recognize print jobs from my laptop. I printed on this printer just a few days ago. But today, I cannot print. Both the printer and my computer say that they are connected and everything should work just fine. But I have three print jobs in my queue which say otherwise.
4. Because I need to print out a homework assignment for Monday, and the other 3 printers in the house are useless to me, my dad just set up a fourth printer. This is another HP which came free with my brother's laptop last January. It hasn't been used yet because no one has needed it. I'm hooked up to it right now and my computer has been installing the drivers for the last twenty minutes.
I think the main problem with all of these printers is that they were free. The Lexmark and the later two HPs all came free with laptops my family purchased in the past year or so. The first printer, the leaky HP, is a hand-me-down from one of my mom's friends. The friend had purchased a new printer and no longer needed the old one. We took that printer several years ago to replace a printer that came free with my parents' PC (which is very old now and on the verge of death). That particular free printer was just awful from the start so my parents gave it to my newlywed sister and her husband who used it about once before they decided it wasn't worth the trouble, and they bought a new printer anyway.
The moral of the story: don't use free printers--they're just not worth the price. (Better yet, let's just give up printing and avoid the hair-pulling-out experiences altogether.)
8 years ago
3 comments:
that's right--give up on printing. everyone worries about computers becoming self-aware, but has anybody even considered that printers have already accomplished this? Evil printers already lie in wait, preying upon helpless college students. It's a tragedy this is discussed more openly.
My printer was nearly free with my laptop. It's a HP printer, copier, scanner in one. I guess it's still working because I paid $29 for it.
Now you know why Kinko's pulls off the prices they charge - the only difference between your printer and theirs is that they maintain them for you (in theory).
As one who has worked in printing the past 15 years, I recommend that we print close to nothing, and laminate even less than that. Do you really need to hand out those bookmarks at church? You know they'll just get stuffed in the back page of the Bible with a bunch of other stuff. You might not realize it, but you're cursing those people, because even though it's basically idolatry, people feel guilty throwing away a picture of Jesus - just like they get guilt tripped into Forwarding those "Fwd:" things. EVIL!
Knowing the hassles, I rarely print anything, and have just forced myself to get comfortable with reading a computer screen.
As a side note - printing deals with the issues of contrast and darkness constantly. I change the darkness on screen moment to moment depending on what I'm looking at. I highly recommend this approach.
- Chris Hayes (Deana's husband)
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