Amanda, the Printer

Amanda came home about 4 years ago. She was our first ever wifi printer.

Family was agog with excitement.

You didn’t need to collocate with the printer to get your job done. One could practically operate from a different time zone.

And for a few days we enjoyed the freedom of sending print commands from different parts of the house.

Not just that we could print from different devices as well.

What a joyful time we had.

Engagement scores were through the roof.

Of course the honeymoon didn’t last.

A few months in we discovered Amanda had a drinking problem. She needed her ink to be replaced. It seemed pretty quickly too.

And every time you topped her, we needed to check that she was able to do the print equivalent of the walk and turn test. In her case it was called alignment testing. Which involved a lot of ink as well.

We had to mortgage our house to feed her drinking problem.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the initial TLC got to her head, pretty quickly, and she started behaving badly.

Sometimes she’d just refuse to print.

You could reboot, reset, reprint, but nothing would come. You could even hear her making noises to suggest that she was about to give you what you wanted but then she’d go quiet.

Other times she’d spit out blank sheets of paper. No idea what had got her goat that day but you would be recipient of her mood swings.

One day she woke up from the wrong side of the printer head and decided she’d print everything with a light green background tinge. And this was the day we needed our luggage tags to be printed. While we got funny looks from the airport check in staff, atleast no one dared tamper with our bags.

Another time she got into her head that we were short changing her by putting inferior quality paper and just jammed the machine. Every single page was stuck and we took an almighty 5 hours to clear the mess and get what we needed.

Any resemblance to a spoilt brat is not coincidental.

When she’s good she’s amazing.

It’s when she gets into one of her moods that everyone around has to be careful.

Right now she’s sitting quietly right beside me and I hope that when I send my thesis to print she doesn’t throw another one of her tantrums or get tired half way through and need to be fed some tricolour cocktail.

What I really need is a Printer Mcphee.