Cascading Failures
As a part of our final run-in towards getting the adoption done and finished, we have to prepare various documents for the courts – in triplicate.
There's a fairly weighty form for each child – perhaps 15 pages, which quite apart from the chore of filling out 9 times (3 forms x 3 children), eats quite a lot of printer ink.
We (supposedly wisely) bought an inkjet printer last Christmas. It prints photos wonderfully. It ran out of black ink last night while printing the final set of 3 documents out.
Never mind, we thought, we'll get some more ink in the morning from the shop in town. W wandered in this morning after the school run and then phoned me.
“What are we going to do! They have no ink left at the shop!”
She then emailed me the document in question, talked me through filling it out over the phone as I typed, and then I sent it to the printer in the office. It printed out twice perfectly, but then either Acrobat or the printer conspired to start printing random pages in whatever order they wanted, sometimes missing half a page.
I switched the printer off and on. It actually got worse.
Therefore it must be Acrobat. But there is a catch. The acrobat document had security implemented – meaning I could not save the form contents I had filled out. Mind numbingly stupid.
I therefore figured out that among the printouts that had gone screwy, I actually had all the pages in various different attempts to make one document up... and did so.
Back on the ink issue, I ordered two entire sets of ink cartridges from Amazon last night, AND a new HP laser printer. Given that a laser printer costs less than 2 lots of ink cartridges, the long term economics of printing were fairly obvious.