Printers

I used to have a printer, long ago. Connected to my computer with a wire. When I clicked ‘print’, it printed my document. If that happened to be a photo, and I had put photo paper in the tray, a beautiful printout of the photo was roduced. I printed hundreds of photos and I don’t remember ever to have had to renew the ink cartridge. I remember wondering where the ink came from, because I expected that the cartridge would have to run out of ink one day, but it took a long time.

Now my mistake. Technology improves, there are printers that you can put in a separate room, and you connect to them wireless. Somewhere I read that my Mac would run well with an HP printer. Now I know that that presumably had been one of those concealed commercials I had stepped into. I threw away the old printer and bought the new one. Not terribly expensive, it seemed. It had 2 trays, one for photo and one for documents.

It took me 3 hours to figure out how to set the wireless connection, but wow, it worked! I printed a beautiful photo. Not knowing that not only was that the first successful printout of the photo, it was also the last. To print out a document I has to switch to the A4 tray. From that moment on, no matter what I did with my printer instructions, my photos were printed in a messy way on A4, not on the photo paper.

When I came to the lab where I work, they had installed a new printer there. Took me 3 hours to figure out how to connect to that printer. Wow, it worked! Then I found out that the connection to my home printer was ruined. After 3 hours I could restore that connection but now the printer in the lab is no longer recognised. Again 3 hours.

Then the cartridge of my home printer, somehow, ran out of ink. Now I discovered why the printer had been cheap. The company decided it is smarter to earn their income by selling very expensive cartridges, with very little ink in them. There’s chip in the cartridge whose only function it is to make sure that you don’t use ‘counterfeit’ cartridges, which are cheaper and contain much more ink. Using such cartridges requires that you peel off the chip from the ‘empty’ cartridge and glue it on the new one. Only takes just 3 hours.

I gave up. At home I have a non functioning printer, and at the lab they went to an other system again. I send my documents to my secretary who managed to keep her printer functioning, and at home, I go with my memory stick to a shop for printouts of the photos.

I refuse to spend any further time on printers. Printing things myself is something of the past.