Battling with printers

Yes, I know, I know, my blog post is late, but I have been in a to-the-death grudge match with a printer.

I was planning to blog about something else entirely. I'm so steamed from paper jams and error messages and printers taking so long with "initializing" that I didn't get lunch until 2 p.m.

Things could be worse. I could be purple with ditto machine ink, or black and blue from carbons, or sliced with papercuts from separating yards and yards of dot matrix paper. I love, love, love being able to change one word on a page and not having to correct all the pages thereafter. And yes, I AM old enough to remember a ditto machine. So I should really be grateful for printers.

Printers and I, however, have never gotten along very well. Maybe it's because I so seldom print anything out. Most of my pages stay as neat little kilobytes on a computer file (backed up, naturally). So the time comes for me to do a massive printing job, and I find myself cursing and kicking and whining -- with a background of soulful violins accompanying my sob story.

Maybe it's because I don't use them that often and I'm completely unfamiliar with them. I like to think more dramatically, though. When I am in the throes of agony, I am CERTAIN that inside that innocuous gray and black box resides a forked-tail little red devil, tee-heeing every time he sticks his prongs into the mechanism and creates yet another paper jam. He dines on printer ink and sips on my tears of frustration.

Boy, after all my frustration, does he need to take some Maalox today!