Oct 2, 2020 3 min read

A law of nature holds that within two days of your having purchased and installed new printer ink, the printer itself will stop working.

This lovely bit of technical adversity happened this week.

I was 40 pages into what will eventually be a 120-page project, with the printer spitting out pages of text like an angry llama, when everything stopped. The message on the little window said “malfunction of printer head.”

My printer had croaked, taking with it my planned, long day of work.

I’m in the post-production phase of a project for WQED, a documentary about food insecurity in Western Pennsylvania. Having spent all summer filming, it is now time to write the script, an agonizing process, which requires that I have word-for-word transcripts of each of the two dozen interviews we filmed.

The transcription used to require my typing along as I listened to the interviews. Now, there are phone apps that do the tedious work. Although the app doesn’t always hear things right. For example, the person on film said “food pantry distributions,” but the app heard and wrote, “panty distributions”- a bit of charity that doesn’t seem like it would be much help.

It is the kind of honest technical mistake that can be easily fixed.

The dead print head was a bigger problem. The farmer fiddled, pulled out the ink cartridges and put them back in, but nothing.

“The printer is done,” he said, adding something about moving parts and machines having a life span.

The finality of that, and the inconvenience of the honest-to-goodness pickle I am in for work, sent my memory back to grade school and the delicious smell of ditto pages. All day long we would hear the “thunk-thunk-thunk” of the ditto machine as the office secretary ran off copies. Pages would emerge from the roller all damp and fragrant. By the time the page landed on desks, they were still a bit wet. There was nothing we could do but draw the pages up to our noses and inhale deeply the sweet blue ink.

The ditto machine went out when copiers came in, and took their intoxicating chemicals with them. Through college and graduate school, I was still writing on a manual typewriter, making copies with carbon paper and correcting mistakes with a little bottle of chalky white paint.

Computers and printers brought a sleek perfection to the process of putting words onto paper, but at a price.

Our printer requires both black and color ink cartridges, even though I rarely print in anything but black. Two weeks ago I paid a small fortune for new ink.

For many minutes I stood in front of the ink display at the office store, marveling at how the boxes are locked away in hard plastic cases, and marveling, too, at how clever the printer companies have been to rig the system in such a way that I would pay $93 for something that must cost pennies to produce.

So that my new ink isn’t wasted, I’ll look for a new printer that will use the same size cartridges. I haven’t shopped around yet, but I won’t be surprised if that printer no longer exists. In order for me to keep spending money, printers must eventually croak, I guess.

But why now?