Someone from Marketing asked me to print out a large number of Powerpoint slides at 30″ x 40″ scale.
Her: So, do you think you can have this done today?
Me: No, that’s almost physically impossible.
Her: What do you mean?
Me: You’ve asked for 24 slides each of which is 30″ x 40″ for total of 720 inches that need to be printed and at a little over an inch a minute that’ll take 10 hours. It’s 5 PM now and I doubt you’ll be here until 3 AM.
Her: Don’t you have anything better than that crappy printer?
Me: It’s not exactly crappy. The print head works by electrically charging a few hundred picoliters of ink, a few hundred trillionths of a gallon of ink, and then launching it from a moving target onto a paper surface with an accuracy of more than 1/500th of an inch. Then it does it repeatedly in every color, all at the same time, continuously for hours at a time.
Her: But it’s so slow.
Me:Â How about this, when you both gain the ability to submit work requests with a reasonable heads up time AND gain the ability to take a bullet train from New York to Los Angeles and hit a standard ISAAC bullseye located every 5 feet for the entire journey you can trash talk my printer.
I never thought I’d have to defend that shitty printer.