I’m fucking dying.
Okay, so. Long story short, I need to mail in certain medical claims. Which, while I love my library, is a pain to have to go to any time I need to print. So I figured I’d get a printer.
Found one on Kijiji for $10 and it said it came with ink so I figured, what the hell. Buy it, get it home, find out the ink is dried out (I tried soaking and cleaning the cartridges and got nothing).
So, shit, I think. With the time and effort and money involved, I don’t have the means at the moment to buy a new printer. So I guess I’ll have to plan a library trip.
Go to do the garbage run at work today and go down to find not one, but two, printers. They seem to be in decent shape, if a little dusty. Unfortunately they’re not ink, they’re laser, so I can’t see if I can steal the ink cartridges for my printer.
But what if I just... took the printers? Why not? They don’t have cables but since I got a printer from Kijiji I have cables now. Worst thing, I find out they don’t work, and I bring them back. They’re pretty heavy though. I probably can’t carry both of them.
I look over, and lo and behold, I see a slightly rusted, but perfectly serviceable rolly cart. So fuck it, I get off work, I head down to the garbage area, I plunk the printers on the rolly cart, and I roll my way home.
I live a block down the street, why the hell not. Though, goodness only knows what traffic thought of me.
I get home, hook up the one printer, it has a red error message, and the two times I get it to begrudgingly print, it’s smeary. But still legible! I only need these forms to mail to medical, so fuck it. I don’t care if it’s a bit smudged.
At this point, I have already won.
I figure, what the hell, in for a dime, in for a dollar. I hook up the other printer.
The input screen pops up in what is most likely Mandarin, but is otherwise not in a language I can read whatsoever. So I download the setup wizard instead so I have some sort of comprehension of what’s up, get it all going, and try to print.
I get an error and it says that it needs a black ink cartridge. Strange, I swore when I cracked it open, there was one in there, well maybe it needs to be replaced, ah well. Though it might just be loose. So I crack the printer open, pull out the cartridge, check it out, go to put it back in, and pause.
Hey, there’s a piece of paper stuck in there.
So I wiggle the paper out. This takes a good minute cause it is fucking stuck. Come to find it’s ripped to all hell as though someone tried to pull it out from the other end and failed. Which, has happened to the best of us. So I plunk the ink cartridge back in, close everything up.
And the fucker starts printing. Perfectly.
So uh, tldr; I got a free $500 laser printer cause the printer couldn’t tell the difference between a paper jam and an ink cartridge issue (and neither could the owner apparently).
