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We have a printer at work that’s slowly dying.  The manual feed tray is held in place by a rubber mallet wedged in place between the printer and a desk.  It prints like a stuttering autistic person, should one page fail, the whole project starts anew, usually to stop again at roughly the same point.

At first I thought this was the cacophonous swan song of a dying workhorse but there may be a typographic labor movement afoot. I was printing a document today and it jammed, not too odd except for I was printing to a PDF file. I suspect the work printers have combined forces with the print drivers and are unionizing. This wildcat strike that has been masquerading as a device problem is only the first wave. I must break the back of this printer-tariat (good one, eh?) uprising before the fax machine and the plotter jump on board.

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I’m watching my coworker nearly attack the large, Soviet-style printer to the left of me.  The thing jams like Dizzy Gillespie and no longer faxes.  A coworker commented that this was caused by increased complication of modern gadgets and that he wanted a phone that just made calls and printer that just printed.  Being a child of the 80s and growing up with surly printers like the HP LaserJet II that would only print under a waxing moon or certain tidal periods, I have no problem making the device function.   It is like a child that’s a picky eater and won’t take a ream of paper if the top sheet is off-kilter or toner cartridge isn’t seated just right.  The noise of a properly inserted toner cartridge is that of loading a Thompson submachine gun with a drum of 50 caliber dum-dums.  In the modern office environment is unmistakable.

So my older coworkers are a lost causee, my peers are versed in the ways of hardware-fu but what of our coworkers’ children?  Having grown up in the age of functional printing knowing neither mimeograph nor tempermental laser printers we need to give them the tools to succeed with the next generation of grumpy technologies.  I propose the Fisher-Price My First Printer.  It’ll be large and plastic with easy to identify trays and cartridges with a display that simply shows a happy face everything’s ok and a sad face if something’s jammed or otherwise out of order and will play happy music with bursts of bright light when a printer problem is properly fixed.  Best of all, there’ll be a “at least you tried” feature where the device will provide audible instructions if the operator isn’t able to solve something quickly to avoid early frustration.  Wouldn’t it be great, going up to a printer, having it jam and that experience bringing up memories of a joyful childhood.  That’s the world I want my kids to live in.