Journal

Printer Villain

I have a strange printer. What happened was (I can’t remember if I told you) my previous printer, old and trusty and mostly reliable, printed its last sheet when the drum gave way. Replacing the drum was almost as expensive as buying a new printer, so I bought a new one. It’s the same brand, and in the same bracket too, I think. It just has some fancy wireless capability now. So, I think it’s fairly reasonable to expect it to give about the same level of performance as the previous one.

And you know what I’m going to say next.

The first problem is, paper gets stuck. It gets stuck very often. Paper jams were not such a big problem with the previous printed because they happened very rarely. Besides, whenever they actually happened, I could always get the printer to sort itself out by holding a button (which would make the rollers spit the paper out). No such things here. This printer chokes up once every couple of days, sometimes twice, sometimes thrice, and the only way to take the paper out is to pry it out with your fingers. Sometimes, when it gets stuck deep inside the guts of the printer, you have to open up all the plastic and hope that you can fish out the paper.

More recently, however, it’s been giving me a new kind of problem. It thinks it’s out of toner. That is, it’ll go on a long bout of warning me that my toner is running low before actually saying it has no toner left altogether. At that point, it just refuses to print.

This is impossible. The toner cartridge was brand-new. It’s an authentic cartridge. All my printings don’t show any signs of toner shortage at all. And most of all, after I smack the cartridge around enough, take it out and put it back enough, pray enough, the printer prints again and it looks as if nothing was wrong in the first place.

So, my conclusion is that I have a sly printer that’s just being lazy.

Computer and electronic problems don’t tend to irritate me, but I have to admit that this one gets on my nerves. There’s something insidious about this printer. To think that it sits in a corner of my room, mocking me as I sleep. Maybe it’ll read this blog post when I turn it on. That would be cause for concern.

d

© 2010 a modest odyssey.