To print or not to print

How often do you use a printer? It seems that it's all or nothing for us, our printer either sits there for weeks on end without being used, or Cindy finds a bazillion recipes to print out while I sit there with the photo paper waiting my turn to print out a picture.

A couple of weeks ago Cindy found a recipe she liked and hit print, the printer made the normal printer start up sounds and started pulling the paper in, suddenly there was a loud rattling sound like gears being stripped, and the paper wadded up sideways from being pulled by only one side.

Our printer being bad.

Paper jam! I was thinking, so I pulled the paper out, looked inside, and loaded new paper into the tray only to get the same result, "rattle, rattle, rattle, clank, clank, bruzzzz"

I did this like three times while opening all the little doors and cubby holes and looking into them with my flashlight, only to see nothing wrong but also not able to get the printer to work. This printer/copier/scanner is about nine years old so I made the hard decision to declare our printer dead, I pulled the plug and slowly closed it's lid with a sideways slide of my hand and stood in silence as the sounds of the printer shutting down slowly stopped.

"We need to pick up a new printer next time we go to town" I told Cindy, and a week later we still hadn't bought one, but I had bought us both a new set of ear muffs to protect our hearing when we go to the race this year, I got them online from our favorite site that sells everything from A to Z and these were supposed to be top notch.

Well folks in my opinion they looked like cheap plastic and hardly blocked any noise at all; they looked nothing like their picture. I made a phone call and was told to place them back into their original package and they would send me a return label to attach to the box, all I had to do was mail them back at no cost to me, and my money would be refunded.

"So you are going to mail out the return label to me today?" I asked, "No Sir, I have already emailed it to you, all you have to do is print it out and then tape it to the box." the representative explained to me. "Perfect, I'll get it mailed back today then." I said and hung up the phone.

This is when I realized that I'm not going to be printing anything with our dead printer.

A trip to the Best place to Buy computer stuff and more money than I had planned on spending later, we brought home a new printer/copier/scanner. With our old printer we were able to print from either Cindy's computer, or mine with no problem. I removed the old printer and hooked up the new one, added the ink cartridges, and loaded the paper, Cindy's computer sits next to the printer so I clicked print to get a test page from her computer first, this new printer is really quick and quiet also, it worked like a charm.

I stepped across to my desk and my computer is not recognizing a printer other than the old one at all, so I uninstalled the old printer program and again searched for the new one...nothing, my computer was now no longer seeing Cindy's computer either, so now I am troubleshooting the networking and home group settings, while trying to load the new printer too. A couple hours later and it was time to shut down my computer for the night.

A peek at my desk while I search for printer help.

The next day I had the same luck, now I am searching the web for a solution. I have a whole group of pages opened and am about ready to pull my hair out when Cindy gives our son Tim a call. Tim answers the phone and Cindy says, "Hey Tim, we have a new printer, Jimmy's having trouble, here talk to him." And then she handed me the phone

About forty five minutes later, after Tim walked me through the settings on both of our computers, check this box, unclick that one, write down that new password, now add it right there on the other computer, put your right foot in, take your right foot out, put your right foot in. All of a sudden everything started working like it is supposed to. I thanked him profusely and would have given him a big ole Man Hug if he had been here, our work was done so I gave the phone back to Cindy, and it was again time to shut down our computers for the night.

The next evening (three days later) I started cleaning up the cardboard and Styrofoam from our computer room. I picked up the old printer and started to stuff it into the printer box when I heard a rattle, thinking it was a loose gear I turned the printer upside down and shook it, a white piece fell to the floor followed by a red one, I shook the printer again and there was still something loose inside, so after a few minutes of opening all the doors and cubby holes and doing some more strategic shaking one more white piece fell out.

Good & Plenty Candy (Image Source)

I picked up the red and white pieces from the floor and handed them to Cindy, she looked at the pieces in her hand then over to the Good and Plenty candy box on her desk, and back to the candies in her hand, Oops was all she had to say.

While looking for something on her desk Cindy had evidently sat her candy box on top of the printer, and before she had a chance to pick it back up three little Good and Plenty's took it upon themselves to attempt an escape. Rather than jumping off the front side onto the floor like any normal escaping candy piece would have done, this trio of rogue Bad and Sneaky candy pieces jumped off the backside, thus trapping themselves inside the printer.

As you have now figured out, I have two printers that work just fine; one is just older and sweeter, and oh yeah, Cindy is no longer going to use the printer as a table...

What is your favorite snack while playing on the computer?