Fun With Technology

The other day, all of the printers on campus were down, so I asked my friend if I could borrow his printer. He agreed. So I went over to his place, and plugged in the printer into my USB port. The printer said that it needed to download some software (Okay, so it didn't really say that. A box popped up on my computer screen.). They were drivers. Of course it needs to install software. I told it to download them. The estimated remaining time started at three hours. Then it went to four hours. Then five hours. Then 28 minutes. And from there, it bounced around everything from 2 minutes to an hour for the next 5 minutes. After which it became apparently stable on 8 minutes. At that point, I turned to my friend.

"Do you think we've earned ourselves 15 minutes of Tetris before we go back to work?"

"I want to say no, but I really want to!"

And thus we played Tetris for 15 minutes. The most glorious 15 minutes that have occurred in my life since Thanksgiving. I won, of course. We returned to the printer, and saw the estimated remaining time sitting at 14 minutes. After another 5 minutes or so, it was done. I saw the download box disappear, and went to add the printer to my computer. When I did that, it asked me if I wanted to download the software for that printer. Didn't I just do that? Apparently not.

"You know, we've been stupid," said my friend. "Just email it to yourself, and we'll print it off with my computer." I had already emailed it to myself, so I just plugged the printer into my friend's computer, and downloaded the paper. And then I went back to my computer to change the file format, so I could open it on his computer. After that, I tried printing off the paper. And halfway through the paper, my friend's computer ran out of paper. So we had to get his power cord, and plug it in, and restart the computer, and then re-download the paper, and then print off the two pages that didn't come out.

That was by far the most work that I have ever been through to print a single paper.