Today's Review: The Inneffectiveness Of My Printer

I bought a wireless printer a few months back, one that actually is wireless out of the box, unlike the last one I bought in a moment of stupid. It was also cheap and cool looking, and the ink is easy to replace too, so it's all good. So was the printer, I could click a button on my laptop in the living room and have stuff print out in the bedroom. Classy.

But tonight I needed the printer, and it turned out to be completely useless. I am going to Sundae On The Common tomorrow, and I needed to print the tickets, despite having been able to print them since May. No problem, I thought, clicking "Print" on the PDF on my MacBook. Oh wait, it's not connecting. No worries though, because I recently moved my iMac into the bedroom and hooked the printer up to USB, so with one swift email I transferred the tickets and myself into the other room.

First things first, installing the software. RElatively easy to find and install, and after a reboot I was good to go. Or so I thought. I was greeted with a "Select Device" screen, and one of the boxes duly informed me it couldn't find a printer connected via USB. Even though there was a printer connected by USB in front of me. So I took an alternate route, attempting to select it directly from the print menu. Still no such luck. So not only do I have a printer that doesn't want to be wireless, I have one that doesn't even want to be wired. It is clearly a printer pondering its own futile existence of ink cycles and test pages, and it's having a bit of a crisis. 

At this point I was annoyed. So I fiddled with buttons. One of the menus had an option that said "Games", which I thought was quite odd. Why would anyone want to play a game on a tiny printer screen? So I selected the option and chose Sudoku. It was at this point I realised that it would print out Sudoku puzzles for me, and I had selected two, which turned out to be Easy and Very Easy, hardly taxing. 

But what of the tickets? Well, in one last act of desperation I hauled my MacBook into the bedroom and hooked it up via USB. Instantly printed tickets. Was that so hard printer? Clearly you were in an existential crisis and needed the thought processes that creating a Sudoku requires to stir you from your braindead slumber. But I don't care about that, because you're a printer and you should damn well work.

My rating: 2/5