I Hate Printers — Luke [tiny]

I Hate Printers

When I did desktop support there were 2 types of jobs I always hated: PDAs and printers. Thankfully PDAs went out of fashion a decade ago but printers are still with us. I moved out of desktop support a while ago and now my work has an external contract for the printing service (they run the print server, accounting software and maintain the devices) so largely it is all out of my life.

Until a few years ago we'd never had a printer at home and either Mrs Luke or myself would just take advantage of the printers at work. We never took the advantage too much but if we needed boarding passes or tickets to something printed we'd just do it through our office printer with no harm done. However once our eldest started senior school she would need to print things off for homework several times a week and often would leave it to the last minute. This would cause all sorts of bother and anguish as we usually couldn't print it until we were back in the office. So to create domestic bliss we bought a printer. Just a cheapo HP from Currys for £29. What I liked most about this was the HP Instant Ink. Yes yes I know it is like DRM for ink cartridges but this is something I am more than happy to trade off on if it means we pay £1.99 a month and get new cartridges posted to us automatically when we needed them. This printer worked fine for 3 years and I had actually softened my stance on printers thinking modern ones were not that bad at all really. Then disaster struck and our cheapo printer died! The rollers and motor seemed knackered probably from all the extra usage it had had over the past 2 months. Now that everyone is working at home budget printers are pretty much sold out everywhere or twice the price they were in February but got another HP delivered a the weekend.

HP have done the thing of “simplifying” the software so much it is actually hard to do anything, like turning off direct wifi printing or setting security, but after a while of fighting it we will have domestic harmony again.

I hate printers.

I am taking in the 100 Days to Offload blogging challenge set by Kev Quirk, so there.
https://100daystooffload.com if you fancy printing off the challenge to read later.