It’s war.
Look, I’m only going to talk about this if we all promise not to get angry about it. I know most columns about abortion, Israel, freedom of speech, Europe, and the prospect of a female Doctor in Doctor Who should start like this—but, to be fair, those are all subjects we could all agree on if everyone went down the pub, with the conversation chaired by a couple of mums who made it very clear that everyone had to be on best behavior, no shouting, and all to be finished by five p.m. so they could get back and pop a whites wash on.
This subject, however, has no such possibility of resolve. For it is printers. Printers—the motherbeeping hate units that inspire more loathing than any other invention on earth. Their evil unreliability is the high-water mark by which every other device, past and future, must be measured. To purchase one is an act comparable to purchasing a succubus, demon, or tiny Nazi for £200, plus VAT.
The printer’s grasp of evil is perfect—for they prey on your weakest moment, when you need them most. There’s a taxi idling outside—all you need to do is print out your train tickets/boarding pass/homework/speech notes. You bought the printer four months ago and you’ve only used it six times, so pressing “Print” will mean a joyous printing sound, followed by you running out of the house. Hang on. What. What? WHAT? “Replace cyan cartridge.” “Invalid driver.” “Print is not aligned.” “Paper jam.”
What are you SAYING to me? What does this MEAN?
“Print is not aligned”—that’s just a Situationist slogan about post-Internet media, daubed on a wall. It’s not telling me what button to press. HOW am I supposed to “align print”? Do you want me to do a seminar on a 360 joined-up media? Because, so help me God, I will—except I can’t, because I would need to print out all my notes on it first.
“Invalid driver”? To me, this means “too drunk to get home, order a taxi.” IT’S NOT TELLING ME WHICH PART OF THE PRINTER TO PUNCH.
“Paper jam.” Okay—I know that one. It’s the state wherein a single, noncomplex sheet of A4 paper has, by some inexplicable process, been rendered into a solid origami swan of bullshit by your printer. Said swan is now lodged in a part of your printer wholly inaccessible by any of the useless trapdoors, which means you have to grab the swan’s tail and yank it from the machine, even as the manual insists this will totally invalidate your warranty. But that doesn’t matter! Because you’re about to throw the printer out of the window anyway!
The thing is, the more you learn about printers, the more you hate them. You know that infuriating little “whurdegurdy deee huurrrr dee hurrr” that an ink printer makes for three minutes, on start-up, that makes it sound like a pompous man at the dinner table about to say “I’m not racist, but . . .”? That’s the printer lavishly squirting ink out, to “clear the nozzles”—ink which PC World recently calculated costs £2,291 per gallon. That is more expensive than blood, or liquid Ecstasy. This means it’s perfectly possible to run a cartridge dry simply from turning a printer on and off again—without ever printing a single document. Yes. Things suddenly make more sense now, don’t they?
But don’t think getting a laser printer would be better—according to an Australian study, the ultrafine particles they emit cause a health risk equal to passive smoking. Whether from stress or lung cancer, your printer will kill you.
In Game of Thrones, the unfortunate Arya has witnessed most of those she loves being slaughtered. Consequently, she now recites a list of those she must now kill, like a prayer: “Cersei, Joffrey, Walder Frey, the Mountain, Meryn Trant.”
I have an almost identical prayer, except mine goes “Hewlett-Packard, Canon, Epson, Fujitsu.” One of each of the eleven printers whose last act was to insist “Wifi not detected,” even as I bodily rubbed them against the router, screaming, “LOOK! THERE IT IS! CONNECT!” Or insisted they needed a full cyan cartridge, even though I was printing in black and white—essentially acting like some rock star insisting they want all the blue M&M’s removed from their rider. I threw them all out of the window. All.
How can printers have become so spoiled and demanding? They are the ultimate basic bitch item. I have devices in my pocket that will allow me to video-conference someone on a beach in Tasmania—and yet my pampered, toad-like printer, used just six times a year, cannot manage to do something that peasants were handling in the sixteenth century by using carved pieces of wood. COME ON! I beg any half-competent organization to start making printers. John Lewis, Waitrose—even ISIS, at a push. The world cannot tolerate this much longer. Our spiritual cyan is running dry. We have a paper jam in our souls. PRINT IS NOT ALIGNED.