This may very well be taking place in my front yard very soon.
I don’t use consonance for just any reason. I am really at my wits end these days. My kingdom for a printer that works right!
I had to get rid of the old Kodak that had a few issues but was fed stuff that it shouldn’t have been fed. The brilliant work of a toddler. I don’t remember what exactly was shoved in there but it was certainly akin to putting a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a VCR (which is a terrible waste of pb&j if you ask me). This was the same week that she got a hold of a pen and proceeded to write all over everything in my scrapbooking area.
As it turned out, it was ok timing. Best Buy had a deal where you could turn in your old printer for credit towards a new one. So I did, and after hours of painstaking research came home with what I thought was a pretty nifty Kodak ESP 7250. Wireless, baby. I could order it to print and have it happen all while laying in my bed. I’ve never actually done this, by the way.
We coexisted in bliss for awhile before it started having some major problems, and I started going crazy.
Why all the fuss? Well, for starters, I used to scrapbook like a boss. I’d churn out pages nightly, all while watching episodes of Bones. Who knew that David Boreanaz could be so creatively inspiring? I’m one of those who prints most stuff on my printer, including the pictures. Partly because of the instant gratification factor, partly because you can’t get all of those different sizes for layouts when you go to Walgreens, and partly because I live nowhere near a place where I can get pictures developed quickly without expending tons of gas. When my daughter was a wee thing, my husband ordered me to get a Cricut for myself for Christmas, wrap it, and put it under the tree. My Mom got me the SCAL software the following year, and I was a scrapbooker on crack.
In addition to this, I coupon so we can buy groceries. You know, stuff to eat besides ketchup sandwiches. What I can’t find in the newspaper I sometimes am able to find online. And did I mention that I’m unemployed? They kind of expect you to have this thing called a resume and cover letter. Fortunately a lot of this can be done by email, but not everything. Some places even ask for this on stuff called PAPER!
So back to the printer from hell. If you have a few thousand hours of your life to spare, please buy a Kodak Printer so you can be on the phone with someone whom you can barely understand. I estimate I’ve spent close to that between the two printers that I have owned. There’s the online Support as well-a site that rarely has answers that you actually want to hear. Usually if your printer is having trouble, you’ll spend hours trying to find solutions, only to always come to the same conclusion:
You need a new printhead.
Kodak used to send these out for free. At least that was worth the thousands of hours trying to print a picture without success. But now they are going in the toilet, and I just don’t think they care anymore. So in order to start scrapbooking again without shelling out a ton of dough for ink, I had to pony up the $50 or so for a new printhead.
I pretty much quit scrapbooking about that point. And this went on for quite some time. My Mom finally helped me get a new one, but I found the exact printhead I needed on Ebay, about $20 less. I was excited. I bought new ink cartridges, I prepared for the arrival of this printhead like some people prepare for the arrival of a new baby.
The day it arrived, it took ten minutes to get it unwrapped, installed, and ready with brand new ink cartridges. It then took another two hours online lo0king for solutions as to why it didn’t work properly. It WAS the correct printhead, it just didn’t work any better than the old one. Then I did an online chat with a support rep. The end result? They offered me a new printer. Oh no, they weren’t going to give it to me. If I took advantage of this special offer, I could get a brand new one at 30% off.
HOLY COW! Are you serious???? My old printer isn’t even two years old. Do they really think I am going to pay over $100 for another one of their printers? I only paid $50 for the last one, because I am a bargain shopper. No thank you, I’d rather dropkick the one I have.
Sadly, after trying a few more tricks that I thought I had up my sleeve, I unhooked the printer and laid it to rest. I saved the ink cartridges, because gosh golly I can at least get Staples rewards points for them. I felt like I was paying my last respects to an old friend. One that didn’t treat me all so well.
Then I tried to go on with my life. I brought in the other printer and hooked it up, my husband’s HP Photosmart that we bought on special when he went back to school. We did this so I could still scrapbook and he could print papers for school without running me out of ink. It’s a good printer, but it has an identity crisis. One of two things typically happens-it either forgets who it is or my computer forgets who it is.
Got that? So now the thousand extra hours that I would be spending dealing with Kodak support is dealing with HP. I’m either online trying to get the correct software, AGAIN, because you know you have to uninstall and reinstall everything each time it forgets who it is, or I’m standing on a chair putting the wireless password into the printer itself for the zillionth time. I never thought I’d ever memorize one of those weird passwords, but I know this one by heart. And it doesn’t take long to run the ink out. Every year I make calendars for my parents. This year I was unable to find the blank picture calendars anywhere, so I tried to print the whole calendar pages on the HP. I ran out of ink halfway through. Their Christmas present was given to them with this note: “Get half a year now, get the rest later!”
And of course there was the whole bat cake incident. Since my computer had forgotten the software, I couldn’t print or copy or do much of anything, including the batman symbol I so desperately needed for my son’s birthday cake.
Enough was enough, I was going to get this all together so I could get my creative life back. I was going to get that software, make some calendars, and seriously start learning how to use my Adobe Photoshop Elements so I could make some wicked scrapbook pages. I spent half the day Sunday finding all of the software (again), getting it all ready, even downloading a patch that was supposed to fix all of this nonsense.
Yesterday I tried to print out a recipe. When I went to print, guess what the program said? “PRINTER IS OFFLINE”. The computer knew there was a printer, but the printer did not where it was.
And this, my friends, was when my head exploded. And it was a mess…
I believe it.
The Sadder But Wiser Girl 