‘Printers are evil,’ said the office supplies salesman after I texted him to complain that my new printer was not working.
A day earlier he had installed it perfectly, and it worked perfectly – all the while he was standing there. Then he left, and the devilish thing looked at me and thought: ‘I’ll have some fun with her.’
The problem could be anything. The printer doesn’t care. All it wants to do is not work
I don’t really understand why we can put men and women in space, but we can’t make printers work unless a tech expert is standing by.
Elon Musk says he is going to Mars, and I believe him. I have his Starlink wifi and it’s brilliant. What I don’t understand is why Elon, who can do everything, can’t help make printers work.
Obviously the new world is not focused on us printing stuff, but the reality is, even if you switch over to everything being digital, you can bet your bottom bitcoin that a couple of times a year someone will ask you to either scan something that your phone won’t scan well enough, or sign a document that you cannot sign digitally, no matter what software you download.
At that point, you have to get your blasted printer working. And let’s face it, you can’t. No one can.
You locate it – in the corner of a room in your house somewhere, or in a box in the attic – and you dust it off. You plug it in, it comes to life, you send it something and it either doesn’t reconnect to the wifi or it won’t talk to your computer for some or other baffling reason.
It could be anything. The printer doesn’t care. All it wants to do is not work. When you start investigating, the problem turns out to be something that would defeat Nasa – and possibly even Elon.
Unlike a mobile phone or laptop, which you can cure of anything by switching it off and on again, the printer will not respond to the usual re-boot techniques.
You need to be able to write code to make it work. Over the years, I have bought every printer going, and the last one was an office-quality laser Brother which I was assured was never going to let me down.
This was true, it was awesome, until one day I turned it on and it refused to feed the paper into itself properly.
It had chronic printer indigestion, or professed to have, and nothing I did, and nothing the builder boyfriend did, could stop its guts from mangling paper. And after a while of it affecting to try, and choking and spluttering, it just lost its appetite for paper altogether.
It didn’t even chew it up and spit it out in balls of screwed-up A4. It simply wouldn’t bite the paper at all, and the paper didn’t move out of the paper tray ever again.
That was more than a year ago, and I haven’t needed to print something off since until someone recently asked me to sign a form that would not take an electronic signature. This person was getting pretty fed up with me trying to download new versions of Adobe unsuccessfully. ‘I’m sure you could watch a YouTube tutorial on how to complete a form,’ she said.
So I fired up the Brother, which I had kept in a box, but it confirmed that it still didn’t feel like eating paper, and how very dare I even ask it to.
I was picking the BB up from Cork airport shortly after that, where I noticed they had computers in the walls you can use by putting a €2 coin in a slot. They had printers too. And you could pay a few euros to print stuff off.
I sat down, fed €2 in, and then realised I couldn’t open my email to print off this form because I didn’t know what the password to my email was.
The BB came out of arrivals looking tired and I pounced on him. ‘This will only take a second,’ I panted, and I pushed him down in front of the €2 computer. ‘I’m so tired. Can’t we just go home?’
‘No. Right, I’ve sent you an email,’ I said, fiddling with my phone. ‘Open your email and print it off for me.’
He sat blinking at the screen for a few seconds and then said: ‘I can’t remember the password to my email. I only look at it on my phone.’
That was as far as that went. I had to contact an office supplies man and he came to the house with a brand-new Epson in a box. He set it up on a sideboard in the kitchen, spent an hour laboriously pushing little buttons on the front to input my Starlink wifi passcode and make it talk to things, and declared it all working.
The Epson icon came up as soon as I pressed print on my phone, or my laptop. It all worked beautifully. I paid, and he went away whistling.
The next morning, I came down for a coffee and thought: ‘Ooh my lovely printer!’ I called up the form I needed to print, selected the signing page and pressed print…
Nothing. I tried it on my laptop. Nothing. Some computer code spewed out on to the screen. Evil. Pure evil.
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