This evening I went to the printer to print out a simple job for Pippa. The same printer has worked fine for months; we’ve been printing with it, on and off, all fall. For some reason, it began choking on the photos Pippa wanted (although it printed the Google home page perfectly agreeably).
After an hour of increasing blood pressure, I fetched the old printer Si used to use. It doesn’t work (though to be fair, we haven’t even tried it for months).
Bah, humbug!
[Follow-up: I went in to the office and printed the pictures for Pippa there. Since then, I’ve figured out that the problem on this end was a misfiring black ink jet; it didn’t malfunction predictably, but eventuially I noticed that the startling special effects on the color images I printed derived from their not being dark in the appropriate areas. New ink reservoir, all clear.]
One of the immutable laws of nature is that things that work perfectly will always cease doing so on holidays or weekends. On Christmas Eve morning one of our toilets got badly clogged. The only plumbers available wanted double-time their regular exhorbitant charges. I am now an expert at unclogging toilets! My rate is always triple-time!
oh, good, maybe that’s why i backed into my nephew’s truck two days after losing my job. can i come out now?
And, our corollary this year, is that there will be a sick animal to go to the vet.
Merry Christmas, AKMA, to you and yours.