We love our laptops, our smart phones, and our little Flip video cameras, but there’s one device in our home offices we’ve come to revile. Chances are it’s sitting under your desk, or in a closet where you can avoid thinking about it. You know what it is: The printer.
Ah, but neglect it at your peril!
For when you need that printer, the ink cartridges will be dried up, the print heads clogged, the paper trays jammed, and the buttons and movable parts — their labels and directions embossed in off-white on off-white or printed in 5-point type — unreadable.
You won’t be able to remember if the the paper goes face up in tray one or face down in tray two, but never mind because wherever you load envelopes, when you hit Print, it’ll grab paper from the other tray instead of the one in which you placed the envelopes. Once it finds the envelopes, it will print on them in every orientation except the one you wanted. And — guaranteed — if you ask it to print your return address, the address will not be printed the .125 inches from the left edge of the envelope that your software specified. It will be mangled and cut off:
en Anderson
4 35th Avenue
ttle, WA 98107
I have three printers networked to my Macs and today, when I went to print one measly addressed evelope, not one of them worked adequately. And, as a result of the 20 minutes I spent trying to get one of them to give me even the faintest satisfaction, the most expensive of the printers (though not the one on which I spent $200 replacing ink cartridges that, while full, stopped functioning when I replaced the print heads) is now utterly jammed.
I ended up addressing the envelope by hand, which, of course, I should have done in the first place.
Heh. Story of my life. Printers never work for me. I’m thrilled that 99% of the work I do on an everyday basis is done virtually, and without the need of printed documents. It’s great. Saves the environment and my sanity at the same time.