Me vs. Our New Printer (a.k.a. me screwing up technology).

Despite being a house that’s always buying new electronic thingies and keeping up with the new and improved equipment, we for some reason never bothered to do so with our printer. It’s not like it was just a little old but still chugging along. No, it actually screwed with my head. You know how you’re supposed to be able to put a stack of paper in the tray and the machine feeds itself whenever you tell it to print? Yeah, well that was a luxury our old printer took away. Instead, we would have to hand feed it one sheet at a time in order for anything to be accomplished. You also had to do it just right or it would ignore the paper completely and claim it was all out. Then at random times it would just flash all its lights and basically throw a temper tantrum in the middle of doing a print job and then be like oh, well I have to start all over again. It was basically the diva of the printing world.

Sadly we put up with this for quite a while. I have no idea why. I think we’re just insane because we’ve been holding onto it for at least 6-8 months with it acting this way. Don’t even ask me why because I have no answer. It’s not like we’re attached to it. Actually, I pretty much would tell anyone that would listen just how much I hate the damn thing. I would talk about throwing it out the window and seeing if it can bounce or smashing it with a sledge hammer each time I needed to print something. We would talk about buying a new one and then I guess suffer amnesia and forget about it until the next time we had to print something in a hurry. My only excuse is we don’t really need to print things all that often.

Its stay here has come to an end though. Finally. Last night we were trying to print 10 pages worth of things which is equal to slamming your own head into a wall with that hell of a printer. After getting 7 pages done feeding it one by one and making sure everything printed in the grayscale since it was out of color ink, it had a tantrum. Then after throwing a fit for a couple minutes and ignoring all commands an innocent looking little box popped up saying the job must now restart. Fucking hell! I was so not doing it all again and the hubby took one look at my face which must have resembled either homicidal thoughts or mental breakdown because he announced we were going to the store to buy a new printer. Yippee! Eat that you piece of shit HP printer!

We bought a new shiny Canon printer/scanner/copier machine that is completely wireless. We can put it anywhere and print from anywhere all while sitting on our asses and letting the machine do all the work. It can hold a crap load of paper and keep it out of sight at all times but best of all it can feed itself. That’s pretty much all I cared about so it wasn’t going to take much to impress me. Apparently it has a lot of other features I haven’t bothered to learn about yet because I’m just enjoying the fact that I can print from the couch and it does its job without me having to coax it into working. Such a wonderful thing.

At least it was for the whole 5 minutes it lasted. Now I keep getting a message that says the “printer is not responding”. You have got to be shitting me. Now I have a printer that’s giving me the silent treatment?! Fucking hell. I have no idea what happened. We printed things last night and it went beautifully. I made sure to ask the hubby what I had to do to print things in the future. I did what he said. And it’s not working. I have no idea why and I didn’t do anything. I just hit print like I’m supposed to and the printer is on and says ‘ready’. Just nothing happens. It’s like this one is taking the old ones side. I’m just never meant to print anything apparently.

So I have to wait until the technology whisperer (a.k.a. my hubby) gets home from work and fixes the issues in point 3 seconds. Because that’s how it always goes. Something won’t work for me and I can’t figure out the problem. He just looks at it and it works again. It’s the story of my life.

On a related note, our TV isn’t working. Well, not the TV itself but the Verizon box/DVR thing. It’s just refusing to work. It can turn on and off and I’m getting sound of the channel it’s stuck on but the screen is frozen. I can’t change the channel or get anything to pop up on the screen. It basically ignores me unless I use the power button. It’s been that way since the first time I turned it on today even though it was fine last night.

I just can’t win. Technology and I were not meant to be. I kill all things electronic and it’s all completely accidental. Actually, I never even do anything to them it just happens. Sometimes with me just being in the same room. It’s why I wrote a post called “I think I was born in the wrong century or possibly I’m possessed.” It’s basically this post, only different electronics are involved.

Lets hope I didn’t kill the new printer. Especially since we’ve had it for less than 24 hours.

PS: Turns out our DVR has a bad hard drive that can cause freezing, according to the dude on the phone. So they're overnighting a new one and we have to ship the old one back to them. At least it's fast. It's functioning right now, they were able to reset it but it will only keep happening so it must be replaced.

As for the printer, it's completely fine and we have no clue why it refused to work earlier. It worked fine when my Hubby came home and tried. I don't know why it ignored me though. Who knows.