I don’t suppose for a moment you imagined that the broken printer saga would end with just buying a printer, did you?
Me neither, though I was hopeful that, the OH having ordered the identical printer to the one he had so easily utterly destroyed by ripping a paper-jammed envelope from it, life would be simple.
I have been writing this blog since 2009. It has mainly consisted of my surprise that nothing has proved as simple as advertised, except, perhaps, me, as I am clearly not learning.
The new printer arrived and I left it in the hall for the OH to unwrap and deploy as he had paid for it. See? Not learning.
So I was upstairs writing and I could hear the exclamations of frustration through two closed doors and a staircase.
This is how global thermonuclear war will sound at the beginning: So I have downloaded a new set of printer drivers, I have made my machine the default, I cannot get it to speak to your machine so I have fiddled with your machine and I cannot get it to work, so I have been online and read all the manuals and I have soaked my fingers in every pie I can find locally and I am getting very annoyed, I may just…………….
We agreed. We said. We will buy the same printer and just plug it in and the machines will know no different. We said.
But one of us had forgotten that, besides which he was a man with a need to fix stuff.
I gave it an hour or two. I retreated and indulged in minding my own business. When appealed to: All right you fix the bloody thing. I remained calm and suggested that the OH rang the S&H who went expensively to university for five years of utter penury to his parents and some months of sofa surfing afterwards that frightened the life out of his mother, to learn this stuff.
And for lo they laughed upon a conference call and were boys together against the machine. At one point the S&H had to take over my machine remotely, yes indeed my son appeared in my computer from another town altogether. And after an hour, he fixed the printer, which was not broke and could have worked if someone had just stuck to what had been agreed and had a bit of faith and, thank the S&H, it works.
So the OH laughed in a manly all men together sort of way and I popped out to the post and sent the S&H some money and a lot of kisses and breathed out.
You can print this blog off if you want, and so can I.
And the OH satisfied his need to fix stuff by trying to take the old printer to bits and retrieve the envelope corner so we have a spare printer and he did it for some hours and then he found a thing on Russian YouTube that said it couldn’t be done and believed them. So the partially deconstructed old printer is sitting in the hall waiting to go to the dump. Well, I’m saying old but it was only a few months old, so the OH has registered this one and says we will use this properly as it is his printer.
I try to rise above these things, I do. It will all be the same in a thousand years.
Mind you, that’s what they say about global thermonuclear war.
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