Your Printer Lies

Money saving tip:

Both of my printers lie, and one of them speaks foreign languages. I know the lying/deception comes from the humans who birthed these infuriating appliances, but I'm not inclined to hold the machine blameless. (I tend to talk to inanimate objects that infuriate me. A sign of immaturity my mother says.)

Most of us have been there, desperately needing to print a document when the printer stubbornly informs us that it has no more ink. We know that isn't the truth because we've pushed buttons to ignore the message and the thing prints 1,000+ more before the pages start to fade. There's a ink and toner cartel. Isn't the stuff expensive enough? Do they really need to make the machines say they're empty, so they can sell even more?

This week I bought black ink for the ink jet, the foreigner. I knew I had to make it speak English first, so I looked up instructions for changing the language: "Go to Maintenance, pick your language"....hold on, I'm not even sure what language it's speaking now! How can I find "Maintenance"? I went to Babelfish to translate some words I suspected were German. I lived there for awhile, surely I could figure this out. I typed in "Verbeteringen" and Babelfish told me my printer was saying, "Struggle-Pray". "That lying contraption should be praying!" I thought. "Repent, you evil printer!" I tried Dutch, and that was "Improvements", and I figured it out from there. Now that I had an English-speaking printer it stealthily replied that it could not possibly print in black, because I needed to check its color ink. It's still not printing.

I had more success with the other machine. I thought it still had toner, even though the toner light was on, and it was refusing to print. I did what I always do when I want technical advice and my son-in-law Randy isn't around, I Googled it. I found other frustrated, geeky, souls who had the knowledge. I pressed buttons in the sequence they advised, and it worked! Take that stupid printer! Some of these people fix printers for a living.