For many, many years I have harboured a deep grudge against printers. Apart from the old text-only models, that were astonishingly expensive and astonishingly reliable, all printers are shit and exist solely to make the world a worse place. Evidence as follows:

1. They are scabs. Printing is a very skilled job and very esoteric. Some of the greatest minds of human existence have been printers (e.g. Ben Franklin, Gutenberg, the Wright Brothers etc). When you need something put to paper for anything other than a few quick notes, go to a proper printer! It’ll be far cheaper in the long run than buying some $30 nightmare from Best Buy.
2. They don’t work. No-one, to my knowledge, has calculated the total cost printers create to the economy, but I suspect that the current economic “crisis” could well be down to wasted hours in every office in the world caused daily by printers not doing the only job they were created to do: printing shit out.
3. They’re almost never needed. 99.9% of the world’s printers aren’t needed. If you want to print photos, go to a printer’s shop. If you want to print out your emails, you should be arrested.
4. They’re way too cheap. Everyone buys one and then calls me when the fucking thing breaks.
5. They are a rip off. Oh, they’re so cheap to buy – what a bargain. When you run out of ink next time, work out how much it would cost to get a new printer compared to replacing the cartridge; bearing in mind the printer comes with a cartridge. The mechanics are so cheap and crap that they will break within a year.
6. They are so annoying! You ask them to do their job and they sit there beeping at you to press their buttons for no reason and then they jam up.

Alright, enough. But it was a life affirming experience when I watched Office Space for the first time and realised I wasn’t alone in my hatred of these ridiculous devices.

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