My Husband Says...

[Deb]

If something goes wrong with my computer, I can fix it. I must admit I'm rather limited to software solutions as now that I'm entering my eighth decade I find the awkwardness of working inside the box of tricks leads to many aches and pains, but mostly I manage.

Printers are another matter. I have no idea how printers work though I am very grateful that they do. I have a feeling that they run on spells rather than engineering. If you need to get one fixed you should call an alchemist. We have a wonderful laser printer. It chucks out pages of beautiful script very fast and nearly silently. It is also remarkably cheap to run compared with an inkjet. It sits under the desk ready to do our bidding.

Or rather it did. It had a paper jam one day. We cleared the paper jam but it seemed to think it still had a paper jam. Then it stopped believing paper was loaded when it was. It was so certain that there was no paper that I began to doubt the evidence of my eyes.

We hauled it out from under the desk and carried it through to sit on the dining room table to get a good look at it. I could see about fifty pages of A4 - or at least the edge of them. I pulled the paper tray out and yes, that really was A4 paper, not a mirage. We pulled all the bits off the printer that we could, examined them closely in total ignorance, then put it all back together and connected it up again.

It worked! It printed a whole multi-page document with its usual beauty and perfection. Problem solved! We celebrated quietly and went away. The next day we needed to print a thing. The printer said no. It had no paper. We could see that it still had lots of paper but it insisted that it had no paper.

A friend of ours, in such a situation, put on his heaviest boots and stamped on an expensive recalcitrant printer until it lay in thousands of bits. I confess I considered the same course of action. But I didn't do it. I do become insanely angry at the stubbornness and spite of inanimate objects but crazed violence is not my style. I hand-wrote addresses on packages for a few days and thought about the problem.

In the end I entered a description of the problem and the model number of the printer in a search engine and got about 3,000 answers, one of which eventually proved helpful. Another poor, miserable soul had experienced the same fault and had written to some online help facility. It turns out to be a recognised error. There is a firmware upgrade which cures it! I hunted down the upgrade and downloaded it. It was in a zip file which you must expand into another directory before you can do anything with it. Considering the bandwidth we have nowadays I fail to see the necessity for pesky zip files but I did as I was told and was eventually in a position to apply the firmware upgrade. It required switching off the printer and repeatedly pressing buttons - which seemed very like a spell - but it worked. I went on a printing spree and it continued to work.

I no longer hate my printer.