Technology Hates Me

I started this blog post last night but my efforts at finishing it were thwarted by a bright orange caution box at the top of the page: "WARNING: Blogger is having difficulties saving your work at this time."  I got as far as one sentence, which had read: "I had a golden hour and a half of free time tonight..." What I was about to tell you before I defenestrated my laptop in anger was that all day long, I had looked forward to some rare free time in the evening.  I was going to spend it working on handmade greeting cards for the annual employee craft fair held at my workplace of Children's.  I was thrilled, and a little crazy being hugely, uncomfortably pregnant, to throw every ounce of free time last year into this craft fair; This year, I have all kinds of time and therefore it is completely reasonable to commit myself to hours upon hours of preparation for selling four different types of crafts just before the holidays  I am just as nuts.  But I have found that creating something adds balance to my life, and so last night I was looking forward to being rejuvenated through cardstock and hot glue.

If only my printer worked.  You see, my handwriting, as you clearly can tell by my overcompensation of typed words, is horrible.  Nobody will buy my cards if I have an ounce of penmanship in them.  So I type whatever text I need in them, and print them out in color-and-font-coordinated, carefully measured phrases.  I sat in front of this laptop, carefully-selected cardstock in hand, and began to print out my text.  I need to interject here that Michael just left for a workout, so it was just me and the printer. This is an important piece of information, because you need to know that whenever Michael is not in the house and I need something from a piece of technology, it never works.  Netflix shuts down, my laptop gives me the blue screen to death, simple print jobs turn into catastrophes.  Every. Freaking. Time.

So the second Michael walked out the door, I noticed the printer was blinking, and reading "shutting down."  It occurred to me that it had been blinking and reading "shutting down" 48 hours ago, when I last sat in front of it.  I hit the power button.  Nothing.  I held down the power button.  Nothing.  I held down the power button with more verve, and told it to shut off.  Nothing.  I yelled, "FINE!" and spend the next 8 minutes hanging upside down over the back of the printer and shelving to locate which of the 452 cables might be the power cord.  After picking the wrong black cable three times, I found it, and unplugged the printer.  When I plugged it back in, it hissed and whirred, clearly irritated.  It gave me some uppity message like, "just so you know, if you want to shut down the printer you should really do it by pressing the power button.  So yeah, do that next time."  WhatEVER. After glaring a response to Uppity Printer, I proceeded to put my paper in, but noticed that it was telling me that a cartridge was expired and needed to be replaced.  "Fine," I told it, and replaced the cartridge.  Let's go.  "Please fix paper jam," it requested.  "THERE IS NO PAPER IN YOUR PRINTER," I reasoned with Mr HP.  "NO. PAPER!!!" I tipped it upside down, removed every secret door, gave it some loving touches, then pressed okay.  "Please fix paper jam," it reiterated.  AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Power button.  It was there, no longer blinking, and this time it worked.  I turned it off and on again.

Message:  "Just so you know, if you want to shut down the printer you should really do it by pressing the power button. So yeah, do that next time."

"@#^%@#$@#%!!!!!"

After the printer spit out several print jobs without any ink on them, I finally had one with success.  This, of course, is when Michael walked back in the door, home to his furious wife ranting about how technology hates her.

"Maybe you should just have me do the printing with you," he gently suggested.

"I FIGURED IT OUT!! But now I don't have any time to work on my cards.  This happens every time, EVERY TIME!  I hate it!  Stupid printer.  Stupid!" Much of my anger was in fact towards my chronic bad luck with electronics, but most of it was because it ate into my entire coveted time I had  set aside for mental and creative balance. 

Perhaps I should take the advice of other sources of technology.  My operating system offers Help and Support.  It also offers a Re-Start. When I update Facebook on my Blackberry it says "Refreshing Stream."  And I always think, aaaah, refreshing stream.  Makes me want to simply Shut Down.  Or even better: Sleep, and Hibernate...to a place where there is no technology.