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9:17am on Tuesday, 13th April, 2021:

Printer

Anecdote

Many years ago, I had a laser printer. It was great. It only printed in monochrome, but it was fast and the ink cartridges lasted for 5,000 pages or more. Text came out black and crisp: I really liked it. One day, the ink was getting low so I went out to buy some more. There was a special offer on the cartridges, so I bought two.

It turned out that I'd used the printer so much that one of the parts that moved had worn part of the casing. This meant that it moved a tiny bit more than it was supposed to. As a result, one of the cogs inside was over-stressed, and it broke. Bits of it fell into a long, cylindrical cog and broke that too. I was left with a broken printer, one unused ink cartridge and one practically-unused cartridge. The manufacturer (Hewlitt Packard) no longer made printers that used the same cartridge, so that was that.

You may recall that recently I needed a new ink cartridge for my (now inkjet) printer. I bought the cartridges online, but continued to use the printer because I had plenty of black ink. Before the new ink arrived, the printer started choking. Online videos suggested that it was doing this because it was low on ink (even though I wasn't using the ink it was low on). I therefore waited for the new ink to arrived, installed it, and tried again.

It made no difference. It turned out that the track the printer head runs on had been damaged by a piece that had fallen off from somewhere else inside the printer. I was left with a broken printer, one unused ink cartridge (a black one I'd bought for when I ran out) and three opened-but-unused colour cartridges. The manufacturer (Epson) no longer makes printers that use the same cartridge, so that's that.

I now have a new printer. This one uses actual ink, coming in actual bottles, so I'm rather hoping that when it decides to die immediately after I've bought some more, I'll be able to use that ink in whatever replacement comes along next. I don't expect I will, though, as they'll make it less viscous or something just to stop me.

I bet the scanner on this one breaks first.




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