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canon in hp minor (i'm back)
March 30, 2006
I felt bad. It wasn't such a bad little printer - all it needed was a little love. No, actually, all it needed was some designers with half a brain and a corporation behind it that didn't equate screwing the consumer with dollar signs.
No, really. I was sad. I've always tended to personify objects, to feel they have some sort of life, and some sort of feelings, and I sympathize when one might feel badly. This includes inanimate objects. Not so much rocks and soil and stuff. OK, at least not all the time, because I just don't have the time for that.
Let's say I'm playing Spider Solitaire. I have a ten, nine, and eight showing in one column, and an eight, seven, six and five in another. Since the game is about building sequences of cards, the smart thing to do, of course, is to take the seven through five cards and slap them down onto the other column.
But I feel bad for the eight that I'm robbing of its chance for greatness, and that will end up alone. It wasn't its fault that it was the beginning of the chain - it was, literally, the luck of the draw. It had its little friends, Seven, Six, and Five, and here I am ripping them away to put with a bigger chain, just so I can maybe win a game, which is unlikely, anyway.
And there's always been the helpless victims of my anger that could neither cry out their pain, nor defend themselves in any way more effective than bloodying my knuckles or breaking a bone or two in my hand.
A porcelain bowl, part of a set of my favorite bowls, thrown into a sink. It wasn't as solid as it seemed.
A pen, a windshield, a wall, not mere testaments to the weakness of my control, but things that themselves suffer because of it.
So, when it was all over that night, when the wave passed and receded, and only the regret remained, my little printer sat there with its little cover bashed in. It made a sad little strained sound as its broken little printer head tried to move down its shiny little track, but it hung on a jagged edge. It was beyond repair. I had bought it at a discount for $64.99 at Frye's a few years ago, while I was still unemployed, and newly relocated from the home I had shared with my former girlfriend. We were both refurbished, damaged goods hoping that attempts at mending would make us, if not whole, then worthy of some purpose, of somebody.
One of its last efforts had been to print out hundreds of pages of writing that were bound into a carefully and painstakingly chosen three-ring binder. I had wondered if it could handle the task, but it came through for me.
And then, on that horrible night, failed by the design choices made by its corporate parents, and it couldn't do what I asked of it, and with a couple of blows, I killed it.
Later, adrenalin fading to a leaden remorse, I sat and stared at it, and I saw.
So, several days later, armed with a Best Buy gift card, I went to find not a replacement, but a successor. The first printers to catch my eye were two purposeful-looking black devices that printed photographs as well as your run-of-the-mill black and white documents.
The differences between the two were negligible, it seemed, because quite frankly, they both looked extremely cool and impressive. One was an HP printer, and the other was a great-great-great grandchild of my so-recently deceased Canon, a family that only days before I had sworn to never associate with again.
After about half an hour of waffling and staring at the two units at various angles, and poking at them to test their structural integrity, it finally occurred to me to get some test prints. I brought in the little wafer storage thingy from my digital camera, and stuck it in the Canon printer.
The Best Buy guy that helped me was a bit older, seemingly honest, and possessed an eerily unnatural air of competence and professionalism for a consumer electronics store. I wondered how recently he had become unemployed from some better paying and infinitely more prestigious job.
Still, he was unsure how to work the products, so I offered suggestions along the way. It turns out it was fairly straightforward. We picked a good sample picture, and hit "print".
It clicked and whirred, then kachunked.
It whirred and clicked... then kachunked.
It repeated each process several more times, as if to prove that it really was making an effort, before it admitted failure.
Another Best Buy employee's knowledge was limited to the concept that the printer took in some sort of paper, and pictures came out the other end, a process that was apparently as simple as the flow of nutrient through his body, or information through his smallish, yet echoey noggin.
I ended up buying a $69.99 HP.
It sits sleekly at the back of my desk - a simple, pearlescent white, curved bar of efficiency, constructed to make it more palatable to Apple cultists. It's pretty, furthering my desire to own an Apple computer to just look at and not use. It takes up far less space than its predecessor. It's very fast. The prints are clearer. I do love it, and it has a life of its own.
The old Canon printer, though, still sits in a box against the wall, where it completely refuses to either decompose or ascend to a loftier plane in a flash of holy light. I can't figure out how to fix it, and I can't seem to throw it out.
It seems obvious and natural to me that inanimate objects feel happy, sad, lonely, useful. But every night and every morning, I wonder if they forgive.
Posted by Rob at March 30, 2006 10:02 PM