So the printer at home started doing funny things. Like dragging half a ream of paper into the carriage at one go, then saying ‘paper jam!!’ Like, ‘no shit!’ And ‘well who fucking jammed it???’ I showed my brother. Who comes round to play bridge every week, but as he’s a professional compooooter troubleshooter and installer of networks and all manner of technical things, it would almost be rude not to ask him. Though with printers, the answer’s generally the same. Even without looking. ‘Buy a new one’. Because they’re cheap and when they go wrong they can NEVER be righted. Which I knew but just thought I’d check for confirmation with a ‘fessional.

And for about the price of buying a set of new ink cartridges, you get a brand new, all singin’, all dancin’, all… all fucking everything! except printing, printer.

They used to call it ‘plug’n’play’. The implication being that even an idiot could get it all working within the blink of a very slowly-blinking eye. Like a hippo’s eye maybe. Well they certainly underestimated my level of idiocy. Anyway, I plugged, I did all it said, until it got to ‘now go on the HP support website and instal’. Ah. Ok. And its actually www.123.hp… etc. And all through its about ‘123’ because what’s easier than that? Michael Jackson sang about it with some of his brothers when… when he hadn’t become a child abuser. When he was still black. When he was still alive.

And this is easy as 473zN4.8173 when expressed as a binomial quadratic expansion of the nearest root to 3.16 expressed in binary. (z = the static flow constant for liquid under constant pressure, N = the length of a donkey). That easy.

The website is shit. Opaque. Leaves you in that fab limboland of ‘has it started? Did it finish? Is it working??’ And thus I failed. But it was bridge night and the brother sat down at the computer and… and failed too. So today, I had to forgo 2 hours of Lila-time to speak to some Russian babe at HP Support. High on skill, low on charm. She ‘came on’ to the computer, as if by magic, and in just… just 2 hours, gave up. But had managed to circumvent the problem so it does in fact look like the printer is working. Even though, by her exacting (Russians. What else??) standards she’d failed and will be volunteering to be sent to Siberian hell. Which was pretty much how those 2 hours felt to me. Sitting there watching my screen being invaded from elsewhere and still getting ‘error’ messages all over the place.

But I can print. I should feel grateful. Not suicidal.

Happy hi-tech Thursday

A xxxx