Letters from Quarantine, Vol. 2

Step Away from the Broken Printer in Your Life

It’ll be OK later. I promise.

Remember that famous printer scene in Office Space?

Mike Judge’s 1999 black comedy cult classic featured Peter, Michael, and Samir as white-collar, middle-class nobodies in a forlorn office setting.

Remember offices? Most of us have left them behind for home quarantine, thanks to a 2020 world where Coronavirus has changed literally everything.

But in this Initech office, quaint red Swingline stapler aside, there’s just one piece of technology that bothers the living daylights out of the entire staff: the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad printer.

“PC LOAD LETTER… WHAT THE F*** DOES THAT MEAN?”

And with one last error message, Michael Bolton (no, not that one) has had it. He and the guys kidnap the printer that night, take it out into the country, and absolutely unload on it, complete with baseball bats and an extremely NSFW song from Geto Boys.

Last week, I nearly had an Office Space printer moment of my own.

So here’s the setup.

It’s Tuesday morning. I spent most of the previous work day trying and failing to apply for Illinois unemployment.

That’s my job now: spending all day applying for unemployment.

I’d guess that was something like the 20th or 25th day I’ve spent a sizable amount of my day trying to figure out unemployment.

Like much of the country, COVID-19 cost me my job. I’m self-employed as a freelance consultant and a sportswriter. Ain’t no businesses hiring consultants right now, and it’s hard to write about sports when they don’t exist. Luckily, unemployment has been expanded to include self-employed as well.

Luck.

It’s a funny word, isn’t it?

I wouldn’t exactly call it lucky that I’ve spent countless hours the last many weeks trying and failing to apply for unemployment on a website that never works with a hotline that never answers.

A couple weeks ago — I think? does time even matter anymore? — Illinois announced the long-awaited Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which was supposed to make things work for self-employed folks like me.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

Instead, it required me to apply and get rejected from regular unemployment, you know, the thing that hasn’t worked all this time already. I also saw I’d need my 2019 taxes filed and hadn’t gotten to that yet either, so I called my accountant and quickly got to work, spent my weekend gathering, and turned everything in.

On Monday, my accountant finished my taxes and sent me a couple forms to print, sign, and return.

Seems easy enough, right?

The only problem is I haven’t used my printer in many months. It ran out of ink, I bought new cartridges but never got around to installing them, life went crazy, and I just never got around to it.

So now here we are: Tuesday morning.

Installing a new printer cartridge should be incredibly simple.

How many ink cartridges have you installed in your lifetime? Admittedly not a question you’ve been asked before, but the answer is probably somewhere between a bunch and a lot.

The algorithm is the same for any printer: turn the printer on, open the little door so the cartridges slide to the front, take the old cartridge out, remove the tape thingy off the new one, snap it into place, and off you go.

Snap the new ink cartridge into place.

It’s a pretty straightforward step.

Slide the ink cartridge into the correct color position and snap it into place.

And, for the life of me, I could. not. do it.

Oh I snapped, alright.

I snapped mentally and emotionally and exasperationally and everywhere in between.

I pushed that stupid ink cartridge in. I twisted it. I pulled it. Pretty sure I bopped it at some point.

I shook it a few times.

I set it down, pretended to walk away, then leapt back toward the printer in some sort of ill-conceived inanimate-object sneak attack.

I think I even blew on the ink cartridge at one point, like it was an old Nintendo game.

Nothing.

I could not get that dang cartridge installed.

I held it up next to the old cartridge. Perfectly the same. Same size, same number, same code. Same little color dot smile taunting me.

I looked it up online. Yep, that’s the right cartridge. I searched YouTube and watched step-by-step videos. I scoured the HP website and talked to the virtual assistant. I called my IT friend, in case maybe he could help.

All of them got to that same stupid step:

Slide the ink cartridge into position, and snap it into place.

I tried.

I tried and tried and tried. For two hours, I tried.

I tried and cried and tried some more. And finally, I gave up, dejected.

So much for filing my taxes or getting unemployment. I couldn’t even install a stupid ink cartridge. No wonder I’m unemployed.

Eventually I gave up. I literally stacked some papers and other stuff on top of my printer, just so it wasn’t sitting there staring at me all day, gloating.

I found another way to get the taxes printed and filed and moved on with life.

Last night, for the first time in a week, I noticed my printer again.

I was in a good mood and watching TV and figured why not go ahead and try again. Maybe the printer had a bad day.

I turn the printer on, open the little sliding door, pick up an ink cartridge, and ~SNAP~ it pops right into place.

Stunned, I immediately fumble for the color cartridge, eager to pop it into place before the printer can change its mind and reject me.

And that’s when I saw it.

Of course, it was the right ink cartridge the entire time, the right slot, the right printer. But I had been putting it in all wrong, obviously wrong, so the printer ribbon inside never would’ve lined up with the paper. I had the cartridge turned 90 degrees, so you could see the label, but the label was supposed to align up.

You’d think maybe they could have stuck a little “THIS SIDE UP” on there, but let’s be honest. This one’s on me.

I snapped the second cartridge in place, printed a couple test pages, and that was that.

Printer fixed. It was never broken in the first place.

Turns out, I was.

That’s the thing in 2020.

We’re all a little broken, aren’t we?

Our brains are just completely and totally fried. We have utter decision fatigue because every single decision suddenly has literal life-and-death implications, pretty much overnight.

Should I go to work? How about the grocery store?

The car’s been on empty for weeks; do I dare go to a gas station? How long can cars run on old oil? Is an oil change safe? Do they have to go into my car to change my oil?

I have a bit of a cough. Is it that cough? What’s my temperature? Wait, what’s my usual temperature? Should I know that? Should I go to the doctor, just to be safe? Should I stay away from the doctor, just to be safe?

Every decision comes with 50 other questions attached to it. And all these decisions have, collectively, completely fried our brains. Months into this Coronavirus quarantine, we have nothing left.

It turns out my IT friend had the right step in mind but the wrong piece of equipment:

I should have tried turning my brain off and back on again.

Really, that’s what I did end up doing, by accident.

I turned my brain off by walking away. I faced my humiliation, admitted defeat, turned off the printer, and walked away from it. Fine, stormed away, but either way, I left that piece of junk in my dust.

Then a week later, in a moment of happiness and health and clear mental capacity, I took another look, and everything clicked. Quite literally.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this:

Kindly step away from that broken printer in your life.

Just do yourself a favor and walk away.

Do something else. Go make a sandwich. Read a book. Watch a little TV. Step outside and get some sun. Play with the kids. Sleep on it.

Just stop.

Stop and walk away from the broken printer in your life, whatever it is.

It’ll still be there tomorrow, I promise. The one thing we know about broken printers is that they stay broken, right up until they’re not.

Maybe, in 2020, the problem isn’t always the printer. Maybe it’s not even really us. Maybe it’s just the exhausting world we’re living in.

So today, whatever that broken printer is in your life, please do yourself a favor and slowly back away.

It’ll be OK later. I promise. ■

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