The Age of the (Aggravatingly) Smart Machine

(Or: One Disgruntled User's Frustrations with Printers)



From the moment that I laid eyes on it, I should have known that I was in for trouble. After all, as the old saying goes, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

* * * * *

Here is how the story goes.

Back in September, I decided to purchase a printer. I’m the kind of person who finds reading on the computer for extended periods of time difficult. Despite numerous attempts to read on-screen, I still prefer the physicality of text. My eyes find pleasure and relief in the printed word. (You’ll not, in other words, find me curling up with a Kindle any time soon.)

Anyways, back in September, after a great deal of difficulty that involved no less than lugging a large demo Epson printer on the bus and accidentally denting it a few times during my trip home (it was box-less, carried in two plastic bags, and ridiculously heavy), I managed to transport and set up this beast of a printer in my apartment. It was an all-in-one contraption, able to scan, fax, print, and copy in colour. And it was, amazingly, only $34.99 at Best Buy. A veritable deal.

Within a few weeks, I had used up the complementary black ink and had to purchase a new cartridge, which ran out in a ridiculously short amount of time (even though I bought the “heavy usage,” i.e. more costly, one). In mid-November, the black ink had run out again. After dishing out yet another $25 and installing the new cartridge, I discovered that the complementary colour ink – which I had used to print, perhaps, five documents all term – had somehow run out as well. That’s when I realized that the Age of the New Printers means that everything shuts down when the colour ink is deemed to be empty. The machine’s printing capabilities simply cease to function. All the amount of black ink in the world will not get it to print a single page.

As it was near the end of the term, I simply decided to print all documents at school rather than deal with the fuss – and cost – of getting new ink. In hindsight, a perspective which all historians will always have at their disposal, that was a mistake.

* * * * *

About a week ago, I finally had a chance to pick up some colour ink cartridges (the kind for “moderate usage” only), installed them eagerly into my dusted-off printer, and looked forward to the convenience that modern technology would again afford. (I would not have to go to the computer lab at all hours now just to print readings.)

That’s when I realized that modern technology does not always work in one’s favour. The document I printed, which was simply set in black, came out starkly, aggravatingly, white. The black ink cartridge must have dried out over Christmas break. So, it appeared that I had just shelled out $35 for colour ink in order to be able to access black ink that was no longer operative.

This evening, however, I tried to print a document again, in black, just to see if something miraculous might ensue. And it did. The machine managed to cough out a document in black ink. The printout was extremely irregular in quality - numerous lines were missing - but at least the page was no longer blank. Eager (and slightly foolish), I printed the document several more times, thinking perhaps that persistence would pay off. Although the quality did improve, the document was still quite spotty in areas. That’s when (again, eager and foolish), I decided to clean the print heads, despite the warning that this function would consume ink. I then printed a sample document. The result was much better, but still not perfect. However, I discovered with shock that running the cleaning function used up half of the new colour ink cartridges, according to the meter.

I now had two choices:

1) Run another print head cleaning (which would probably use up the rest of the colour ink – of which I had not, in any real sense, used), or

2) Give up on the black ink cartridge completely (which was also unused, except for the test printouts), and shell out more money for black ink.

(Why I didn’t decide to unplug the printer then and there, affix a sign on it that said “Free – completely, utterly free”, and put it out in the hallway of my apartment, is still something I have not answered satisfactorily yet.)

Instead, I had a flash of inspiration. History came to my rescue: I remembered that I had owned an Epson printer before. It had run out of colour ink before. And I had “fooled” it before - by going through all the on-screen steps of installing a new colour cartridge and “charging” the ink, without actually doing so. With the colour ink meter subsequently indicating that it was “full”, I could then finish troubleshooting the problem that I was dealing with at the time, which required, finicky machine that it was, colour ink.

Cheered by this memory of the not-quite-so-smart-nor-sharp-machine, I decided to run another print head cleaning tonight. Sure enough, this nearly “used” up all the remaining colour ink. I printed a few more test documents in black; their quality was improved somewhat, but it was still blanking out at certain lines. I then tried to run one more cleaning function, but the printer told me that I couldn’t – there was not enough colour ink to support it. In fact, the warning of low ink was now replaced with the message that there was no more colour ink. (Apparently, just even attempting to run a print head cleaning uses up the ink, by the printer’s standards.)

Confident, however, that I could fool the machine, I then proceeded to go through the cartridge-replacement steps, clicking the “Finish” button at the end with a flourish. The printer responded by humming and telling me that “ink charging” was occurring. I smiled - and then, I frowned. A box had popped up indicating that the replaced cartridges were, in techno-lingo, “expended.”

In other words – the machine knew. It was telling me that I could not fool it. It could detect that I had not actually fed it anything new, despite my subsequent actions of physically removing and re-inserting the colour ink cartridges, which, I have to add again, were not really used, but were indelibly (and one might even say ingeniously) branded so by the machine. Such crafty labelling had made the colour ink inoperative.

Welcome, friends, to the Age of the (Aggravatingly) Smart Machine.

* * * * *

P.S. Sixty dollars invested into printer cartridges since mid-November and I have still not been able to print one actual document since then for any useful purpose.

If it were still in vogue to be a Marxist historian, I would seriously point to the ridiculously profitable economics underlying printer design as the source of all our (or at least my) present-day ills!