We tend to think of progress in information technology as a given, and in most cases, it is. The internet connection I use now is literally 69,000 times faster than the first one I used in 1993. Chips are faster, storage ever cheaper and more vast. And then there are printers.
To be fair, our printer does things printers didn’t do in 1993. It prints in colour, it can scan documents and photographs and, if you’re feeling a bit old-school, will even send or receive a fax. It will also periodically refuse to work for no discernible reason.
I did what I always do: consulted the internet to see what worked for the millions of people who abide with the same brand of printer (in our case, a Brother). It usually involves disconnecting a cable and pressing a particular button while uttering a magical incantation.
One element of printers’ dysfunctional lives is there by design. The company that manufactured your inkjet printer makes its money not from selling you the printer, but from selling you expensive proprietary ink cartridges for as long as you own it. That’s why it pretends it needs the yellow cartridge to be full for it to print a black and white document.
It was a good day when Cartridge World opened an outlet nearby and we didn’t have to drive to Auckland’s New Lynn in rush hour to buy third-party cartridges to print an urgent document. One manufacturer, Hewlett-Packard, has tried harder than others to prevent its customers from using such third-party inks by deploying what it calls “dynamic security” to “protect the quality of our customer experience”.
The fact that it has continued to do so after paying out millions to settle class actions brought in the US, Europe and Australia tells you how much it relies on being able to capture customers to make money.
Things have been better since I gave up on expecting the printer to perform one of the key features on which it was sold, wireless printing. Time and again, the printer would declare that it had lost its Wi-Fi base station details and I would laboriously re-enter a password by poking at the worst touchscreen ever until I managed to do so without making an error. Acting on the principle that the solution to most wireless problems is in fact a wire, I got a long USB cable and connected the printer directly to my computer.
I have also learnt to avoid using the manufacturer’s own software, enabling any “smart” features or saying anything out loud that might make the printer feel sad or angry. New features and services are particularly to be avoided. Simon Hill wrote in Wired a couple of years ago about trying to save hassle by taking up HP’s subscription printing service, which counts the pages printed and orders ink as necessary. He found himself battered with emails if he dared turn off the printer, which also wasted gallons of ink on test pages and refused to operate if he wasn’t connected to the internet.
A controversial Consumer NZ article once bluntly advised readers not to bother with home printing at all, but some of us still need these terrible office pets for work. And, hey, maybe I like being the old guy at a gig with a printout of a ticket everyone else has on their phones.
Social media friends have advised me that laser printers work without most of the problems everyone has with inkjets, and cost a lot less to run. Several pointed me to a Verge article about a new Brother model that apparently just prints things. I think I have our beast tamed for now, but one day, perhaps I’ll dare to believe.
