It doesn’t matter what my wife or I think we’re going to get out of our new HP Laserjet Pro M1212nf printer-copier-fax-scanner, what we get is The Flavor Chameleon: Broccoli.
I spent much of last weekend hoping to be separated from this machine by having either it or myself raptured. Being left behind by this piece of plastic hell would be my idea of heaven.
This is just the latest of my run-ins with printers, the devil’s spawn.
You’ve had them too. A lost weekend trying to get a simple piece of paper to emerge from a machine. A carbon dust storm set off by a toner mishap. A ream of paper stuffed into a secret place in the printer. The mystery of printer drivers. Ink apparently made of ground platinum.
My newest printer replaces one that suddenly developed an appetite for chewing up paper. A habit that developed right after I fed it a new $30 toner cartridge. Thanks, Brother.
At work we have a bewildering choice of printers, few of which seem to work at any given time. I occasionally print things that may come out in other rooms or other cities because, well, who knows?
The one I usually use in the newsroom leaves a column of blankness down the middle unless you take the toner out and shake it.
The newest printer is so complicated, we had to attend a class to make it do anything. I’ve already forgotten how to use it. It scares me.
On the third floor of the News-Sun is a Linotype machine that escaped the scrap metal pile more than three decades ago.
I’m told that the publisher at the time we switched to computer type didn’t want any of the old machines saved. People under him couldn’t bring themselves to part with it and hid it in the basement until the publisher retired.
Most of the people who work here now have no idea what it is.
I started here when there was a large room full of these machines. They are bigger than a refrigerator and have more moving parts than a car.
It took a skilled person to operate one and it was fascinating to watch as a solid lead bar melted and turned into prose, line by line o’ type.
Linotype machines never failed to print one of my stories, needed ink or got jammed. Sometimes a Linotypist would even point out a mistake in my copy.
This is the 125th anniversary of its invention by Ottmar Mergenthaler.
And that brings me to my point: I think humanity may have gone down the wrong path on print technology.
Contact Tom Hawkins, editorial page editor of the Springfield News-Sun, at 328-0343 or thawkins@coxohio.com.
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