Printers Are Demons

My secondary function is serving as my household’s unpaid IT-adjacent individual.

I’ve fixed software issues with TVs, phones, lots of computers, and setup basic stuff like the router, fax machine, phones, et cetera. It’s infrequent enough to not be annoying, neither my older or younger sibling understands this stuff, and I like to help. I should get our family a Jira setup.

But in my precious 18 years of living, I have never, NEVER found a thorn as nauseatingly difficult to pluck as issues involving printers. I hate printers so much, and I’ve worked with the modern ones. I am positively amazed at how nobody has “solved” something as outwardly simplistic looking as the printer. They’re demons, I tell you. How is it that a machine that had functioned absolutely perfectly for months and months prior, suddenly finds itself indisposed? Demons, I tell you.

None of this even comes from a recent event. In fact, Y2 of the pandemic we bought a Brother MFC-L2710DW. Neat little thing, fits on a desk, faxes (my dad needed faxes, for God knows whatever reason,) and best of all, it’s laser!

Laser printers are so cool; we don’t have to fill them nearly as often and toner is actually quite affordable. Prints really quick, and while the one we got only prints in black and white, that’s fine for us and the print quality is immensely good. No application unevenness, no weird spots where ink applied with the wrong concentrations, and best of all, no issues with alignment! I’ve lost hours of my life from having prints come out horribly and having to run HP’s weird alignment utilities.

But that’s not the point: this printer, as well as the printers before it, have been absolute pains to set up wirelessly. I don’t know what convoluted internal systems HP and Brother use for their connections, but holy smokes, they need to change them.

Printers have disappeared entirely from our home networks like planes in the Bermuda Triangle, flat out refuse to exist for some computers, and refuse to reconnect after a small internet/power outage or something.

So, I have to rerun their wifi utilities. And their wifi utilities work the way they’re intended about half the time, so I have to go around unplugging and replugging things, restarting our home network X amount of times to test different configs, reinstalling drivers, and troubleshooting on the website. And is this process ever fast or straightforward? Never, never, never.

And whose idea was it to make printers their own weird “portals” on a network? Why is there a point on my local network that I can use to LOG INTO a godforsaken printer, of all things?

In the unfortunate event I have to install some drivers for a printer, say I want to use the scanner on one, the drivers always, ALWAYS come with some goofy bloat applications that didn’t really need to exist, and in lots of cases, overlap each other in some functionality but not others, like a weird Venn diagram of printer helper applications.

I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert on what it takes to run a printer, keep it up to date (why does it need to be UP TO DATE!?), play nicely with others on a network, or any of that stuff. I am merely a sorta maybe technically inclined mortal trying to find my way in a printer-dominated world. But for the love of all things holy, couldn’t there be a little less? Couldn’t it be a bit simpler? Couldn’t there be some user accessible logs for what the heck my printer is having trouble with?

The Forbidden Tomb of Canon

While we were shopping around for our forever printer, we bought a `lil Canon multifunctional printer with the same features as our Brother but cheaper and ink-based.

We requested a return on it before they sent it, though, because we discovered a bit too late in the buying process that it wasn’t duplex. I was under the apparently flawed assumption that all modern printers being marketed and sold to families/home offices nowadays would be duplex. Silly me, though I’ve gotta blame myself for not focusing on what I thought would be a pretty common thing.

Anyway, we requested a return and got our money back but still got sent the printer. No clue why. Thanks, logistics!

My dad told me to set the thing up in my free time. But you know what? I’ve never gotten around to it. It’s still sitting it its box, ink probably dried away and gumming the jets up by now. I’ve avoided setting the thing up because I know, KNOW I’ll regret ever bothering.

I want to extend this peace for as long as possible.

Oddly enough, I have never had issues setting up the same errant printers on my sister and I’s MacBooks, and the printer+scanner+fax work natively, without goofy additional software, and beautifully. Thanks, Bonjour. Keep that small island of sanity intact, I beg of thee, printer companies.