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'Printer Ready'. Er… you actually want to print? What, right now?

Reg columnist snorts suspicious powder

Something for the Weekend, Sir? Whirr whirr click. Oh come on, print, dammit. Bzzzzt. Whirr click [silence] brrrrrrrrrrr [silence].

Why is it that an office printer manages to churn out pages day after day without delay or complaint, yet chooses to play silly buggers the moment you are in a hurry?

Eh. Phut. Click.

The green activity light is blinking nicely and my print queue is processing correctly but nothing is coming out of the printer apart from long stretches of silence punctuated by an increasingly frustrating staccato of noisy mechanical buzzes, crunches and farts.

Bzzzzt.

The clock ticks, I don my shoes and coat, ready for a quick getaway. I don’t have a vast number of sheets to print but I do want them printed right away so I can catch the train. The alternative is to hunt for a print shop close to my destination, or plead with my client on my arrival to let me use one of their printers, and that always looks unprofessional.

Hee-haw-hee-haw-hee-haw-hee-haw. Guh guh guh guh guh. Whoo dang-dang, whoo dang-dang.

Great, it’s gone full beatbox. Stop all that electro-grunting and just print, you techno twat.

Eee ooh-ooh. Oooooooh. Uh uh uh uh.

I think it has switched into pornstar mode and is trying to shag the adjacent document shredder.

Opening its front panel, I pull out the tray to check the cartridges. It appears that the printer components have been celebrating Holi nine weeks early: it is swirling with multicoloured powder everywhere.

I pull out the carts and deadly toner continues to trickle out. There is now multicoloured powder on the floor, my hands and swirling through the office air, seeping dangerously through my pores, darting murderously into my lungs.

“Toner running low” reads the LCD display on the front of the machine. My printer is nothing if not a sarcastic bastard.

I dash out to catch the train, paperless. I am confident there is a print shop right next to the station when I arrive, but it turns out that it has been closed down so the site can be redeveloped into yet more luxury penthouse flats.

How many of these luxury flats do we need? Is the long-term plan to ensure that the entire population of central London is made up of Russian gangsters while the rest of us commute in daily from our hovels in the nearest affordable suburb, such as Inverness?

Arriving at my client, I plead to make use of a printer so I can get my presentation documents done. A great deal of fuss is caused to accommodate my request, quite unnecessarily in my opinion, accompanied by a chorus of childish snorting and harrumphing by several of my client’s minions who have been forced to temporarily share their oxygen with someone who actually works for a living.

Their firewall is so strict that I am not allowed to print from my laptop, so I cause more upset by forcing one minion to suspend his terribly important Facebook session so I can print from his PC.

I log in to Dropbox, only to find that it hasn’t properly synced from my computer at home and my documents aren’t there for me to print. To save face, I output a few random business PDFs anyway, plus a few pages from a bestiality porn site so that the harrumphing tit whose PC I have borrowed can enjoy a wild-eyed visit from Human Resources later that week.

In the end, I improvise at the client meeting with the help of a flipchart and a thick black pen that I keep at the bottom of my backpack for just these occasions. I duly win the contract and head home feeling more relaxed and less intent on kicking the fucking shit out of my laser printer when I get there.

On the way back, I read the results of a survey which says small businesses like mine are proving resistant to office technology. Apparently, 65 per cent of us would rather write things down with a pen than manage our diaries, notes and to-do lists with tech solutions.

No less astonishing is the discovery that as many as one-fifth of those questioned in the business survey shamefully admitted to relying on “nothing more than memory” to know what they are doing at any time.

Just think, they’re using memory! In their brains! Oh, the horror.

Admittedly, I have consciously cultivated my image in this column as a grumpy old Luddite but those who know me also know that I enjoy surrounding myself with tech gadgets. My grumpiness is simply the result of my honest appreciation that none of these gadgets can be relied upon in any respect whatsoever, and least of all on those occasions when you absolutely need them to work.

The survey’s sign-off line giggles at twerps like me for making heavy use of smartphones and tablets for document creation without even being able to print documents directly from them. “Many who think they are up to date with business technology are often very poorly connected,” it says.

Well, it’s hardly my fault that Apple has specifically designed iOS to be wirelessly incompatible with my existing printer. Expecting me to purchase a new printer to support the inadequacies of the iPhone is taking the piss. If a mobile phone’s audio speaker is weak and tinny, should I upgrade my friends and only accept calls from people with deep, booming voices?

I reach home and, still burning from my close shave earlier in the day and now determined to prove the survey wrong, I send a print job over local Wi-Fi from my Google Nexus 7. Poorly connected? Hah, I’ll teach them.

Bzzzzt. Whirr click [silence] clickety clickety phut [silence] whirrrrrrrrrr...

Two minutes later, I duly establish a strong connection between the printer and my Dr Martens.

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Alistair DabbsAlistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He is not the kind of person to reminisce about the “good old days” but he would like to see a return of the popular trend of the 1990s in which inadequately performing printers were summarily dealt with by being projected from a fifth storey window. Or it may be enough to keep a baseball bat handy – not necessarily to smash up the printer but to threaten it as required.

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