Curse that printer

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.)

My awesomeness on the first day of school

So today was the first day of my second semester of graduate school. Last semester was really really hard, and that was partly my own fault for not being as dedicated and motivated and hard-working as I should have been. This semester I vowed I would do better. I would come to class every day prepared and on time--which is why I was fifteen minutes late for my first class today and didn't even have a notebook with me. Or my textbook. Or, really, anything.

The story goes like this:

I've been sick all break, and I'm still recovering, so I slept in until a little after 9 this morning. I didn't have class until 11, so I figured I had plenty of time. I sat around for awhile watching my nieces dance and talking to my sister.

Eventually I took a shower.

By the time I got out, it was after 10. Then I showed my brother-in-law some stuff on my laptop since he wanted to use it while I was gone to class.

Then I did my hair and my make-up. 10:20. Time to be out the door (it's a 20 minute drive from my house to campus). I looked around my room for notebooks or paper or something to take to class to write on, but all I could find was a small yellow journal I got for Christmas. I threw it in my bag with my wallet. I looked for some breakfast, and I was fortunate enough to find a banana I could eat on the way. 10:30. I was out the door and off down the snowy streets of Orem.

I got to campus and drove around for awhile looking for a parking space (apparently a lot of people come the first day). Finally, I found a student walking to his car and stalked him to his parking space. I was really lucky to get it, too, because about ten other cars had just given up on that row of parking stalls before I got there.

Once parked and out of the car, I checked my schedule to find out where my class was, and here I made my fatal mistake: I assumed that my class (like all of my previous classes) was in the JFSB, so I only checked the room number, 1107. I thought it was a little weird that the classroom was on the first floor of the JFSB when most classes are in the basement, but whatever.

When I got to the JFSB, I wandered up and down the halls of the first floor looking for room 1107. But the numbers kept skipping, and there was a long row of windows where 1107 should have been. I found a map of the first floor next to the restrooms. I located 1107 on the map, but when I went down the hall, I still couldn't find it. Back at the map, I decided that 1107 had to be inside suite 1100, which was actually a set of classrooms and offices. Suite 1100 was the Family Life Sciences lab, so it really didn't make any sense. I decided to give it a try anyway--it was already 11:10. I entered the Family Life Sciences lab, walked down the hall, and found the missing rooms 1103, 1105, and, at last, 1107--which turned out to be a restroom.

At this point I decided to check my schedule again. I discovered that my class was indeed in 1107, but not in the JFSB, instead it was in the JKB (formerly the JKHB), next door.

I felt like such a freshman, misreading my schedule and going to the wrong building--although while I was in the JFSB I did assist another person in finding their classroom, so daily service points, I guess the trip wasn't a total bust--still, I've been going to that school for how many years now, I pull a stunt like that?

Needless to say, I was very late. I entered class in the middle of introductions--that obnoxious part where everyone says where they're from and what their major is--and had to stumble over everyone else's stuff to get down the aisle to my seat. One guy actually had to move his baby out of the way for me. It was fun.

At the end of class, we were supposed to turn in a sheet of paper with a bunch of lame information about ourselves like hobbies and career plans. I wrote down my information in the yellow journal I had brought because it was the only paper I had, but since it wasn't spiral-bound, and the paper was actually meant to stay in the journal, I had a very difficult time tearing it out. I considered begging a sheet of traditional, lined notebook paper off one of my classmates, but I thought they might all be annoyed with me since I was so late and I trampled all over their stuff to get to my seat and then I sniffled and coughed through class because I'm still a little sick. I turned in my sad, ripped, unlined, half-size sheet of journal paper and left.

My second class was immediately after my first class, and it was in the basement of the JFSB, and I was on time. But then the professor gave us a pre-test. It was specified on the test that it was alright if we didn't know any of the answers. I didn't know any of the answers.

I listened to the pencils and pens of everyone around me writing. Quickly. And occasionally I dared to glance sidways at my neighbors' papers just to see how much they actually knew. They knew a lot. Their papers were filled with potentially intelligent answers; my paper had my name on it. I stared at my paper until the professor said we could leave when we were finished. I left. I was the first. Other people kept writing.

So another semester, another good start. Looking forward to the awesome days ahead.