So Much Effort - Such an Easy Solution

For the last few months I've been having trouble with our printer. It's a great printer and works well, but for some reason it just doesnt' want to print colour any more. I didn't really care for a long time because I didn't want to print colour anyway...it's way to expensive to replace those cartridges. However, I needed to print some things off for work and I needed the printer to start working.

So the hacking began. Now I know what you are all thinking, "You are out of ink!", but no, I wasn't. The ink cartridge gauge said I had 3/4 of a cartridge left. I probably uninstalled and installed my printer about 5 times trying to get it to work. I would take out the cartridges and put them back in. I printed out test page after test page to no avail. I searched for what seemed like hours through all the support web pages for my printer and through all the trouble shooting techniquest. Still, nothing!!

I finally decided to call tech support. So after finally getting through after about a 15 minute wait I was on the phone. Now these tech guys seem to have some weird ways of fixing things. After going through the rig-a-ma-roll of getting all my information like name, rank, favourite colour and most watched reality show we finally got to the problem...no colour printing.

That waas when the weirdness began. He told me to go get a damp paper towel and a dry paper towel. Have you ever tried to get paper towel damp? It's impossible! It's either wet or dry...there is no in between! So I brought back a wet and a dry paper towel and got back on the phone. "Ok," he said, flip over your ink cartridge, put the damp paper towel over the bottom of it and hold for 30 seconds. So I did. And VOILA! I had ink on the paper towel. "I've got colour," I proclaimed to him over the phone. "Ok, now do it again." So I did. This time I had less colour. "Now do it again," he continued. So I did. Even less colour. It didn't take me long to see where this was going.

Then came the solution. "Well, Mr. Mathies, the problem is that you need a new ink cartridge. The one you have is too old and the ink has solidified in it so you just need to buy a new cartridge. Bye bye."

I hung up the phone and looked at my 3/4 full ink cartridge. That's about $30 worth of ink in there. I decided to try it out one more time. Nothing. So I finally gave in and opened up the new ink cartridge package, put it in the printer and printed out a test page. VOILA! Colour! After hours and hours of fiddling and messing around and all I had to do was change the cartridge.

Sometimes I make life so complicated. Any one else out there feel like that sometimes?