The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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4:03pm on Tuesday, 4th August, 2009:
Anecdote
This morning, I decided to print hard copies of some 40 or so academic papers. This will enable me to add to my ever-increasing pile of hard copies of academic papers I have yet to read but fully intend to.
Things went fine for about half an hour, then the paper in the printer ran out. I put in some new paper I had bought. It says "basic value for money office paper" in large letters on the box and has pictures of penguins and bananas. You can't go wrong with penguins and bananas, so I bought some. It's 80 gsm, and quite nice. My colour printer, which I already put some in, really likes it.
My old printer doesn't.
I think it's some combination of stickiness and thickness, but whatever it is, my old printer jams on it. It started off jamming every 5 sheets or so, but soon it started jamming almost every single time. I couldn't print anything without its jamming. I had several hundred sheets in my printer queue waiting to be printed, and it WOULDN'T PRINT THEM.
At first, I just threw the jammed paper on the floor for recycling, but once I had maybe 50 or 60 sheets there I figured I should perhaps try to print on it, even though it had bad folds. I therefore started hand-feeding it in. This worked. However, it meant that instead of going off and buying some cheapo paper of a different brand, with no penguins and bananas, I was overcome with an urge to get rid of all this stuff by hand-feeding it into the printer.
This is why I have spent the past two hours occupied as an auto-feed.
I put in a sheet of my top-quality letter quality paper and that printed fine, so I know it's this new stuff and not the printer in its death throes. I think maybe I'll have to have a look inside it, though, in case there's a paper dust build-up or something.
AND the unopened printer cartridge I found behind my paper stocks, which I didn't know I had, turned out to be so old that all the ink in it had dried up. Augh!
Maybe this year I'll make a determined effort to get printer privileges at university so I can do this somewhere that has fast, monochrome printers younger than my eldest daughter. Last time I tried, they sent me off to find some part-time technician whose office was only accessible through a subterranean workshop I wasn't allowed to enter unless I'd been on some kind of safety course.
Oh-oh, my printer just started making a noise like a chainsaw ... that can't be good ...
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Copyright © 2009 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).