The No-Good, Terrible, Awful Printer and Why You Can’t Do Without It

Seeing things on the page is essential and important

Photo by Joshua Fuller on Unsplash

My god, I hate printers so much. True story: The other day, I was printing something and got an error message saying there was a paper jam. I was in a hurry, so I grabbed my printer, pulling it out from the wall just enough that I could stick my hand behind it, and with one hand, yanked at the paper that was jutting out from its gears. The paper came out—that is, the part that was actually sticking out came off in my hand, but the rest of the paper remained tightly wound in the teeth of the machine. I no longer had anything I could grasp in order to pull the paper out. I stared at the machine for a while, absolutely stumped as to my next move. With a software sort of issue, there’s at least the often-reliable unplug-it-and-wait technique. This was much more basic and purely mechanical, and there was absolutely nothing I could do.

Printers are the strangest creatures in our high-tech universe. Like alligators, they have barely evolved in decades, and they seem absolutely anachronistic, with their chugging mechanisms and their need for ink and paper and their resistance to even the most basic repair by users. And try to find a printer repair shop! They hardly exist. The attitude seems to be that if something goes wrong with your printer, you should chuck it out and buy a new one, since you’ll never find anyone to fix it, or the repair will cost more than a new machine. I bet a huge percentage of the e-waste in the world consists of printers, for that very reason. (Don’t get me started on the outrageous cost of ink, either.)

In my case, the printer was a fairly expensive one, so I wasn’t happy with the quick-and-very-dirty option of throwing it away and replacing it. Plus, the idea that I would trash a $600 printer BECAUSE A PIECE OF PAPER WAS STUCK IN IT made me insane. So I set out to find a printer repair shop, and after many phone calls and fruitless Google searches, I found someone who actually listed “printer repair” among his services. Hallelujah! I still had no idea whether the repair would be greater than the value of the machine, but I felt duty-bound to at least try.