Glad to Have You Back, Printer
Silverchair – “Tomorrow”
About a year and a half ago, my printer started acting up. First, it was really subtle, but it would pull the paper in at a very slight angle. This went on for some time, until the angle got worse and worse, and my papers would end up being printed like this:
Frustrated, we (as I was still living with Callie) borrowed our roommate’s printer and hooked it up. I never bothered to get it looked at, since I’m really bad about that sort of thing. I didn’t want to pay the money to ship it back to Dell, and we had already found another solution. Besides, the scanner on it still worked perfectly.
At any rate, I’ve kept the now-defunct printer hooked up to my computer for a year because of its scanning capabilities. After moving into our new apartment, the printer was sitting on some crates in the living room and I could see into the back of it. I saw some of the pieces of paper it digested* and pulled them out. While I was doing so, I discovered a ballpoint pen sitting in the printer, right where the roll-y wheels feed the paper in. At first I assumed that it had just fallen in there sometime over the last couple of months, as I kept pens and papers on top of it all the time. Then I got to thinking that maybe that pen had been in there longer…
Today I hooked my printer up to test it out, and, um, it was totally the pen. I am SO GLAD I never got around to sending the printer back to Dell to have them look at it, because they totally would have taken one look, discovered the pen, declared me an idiot, and charged me lots of money for it.
Now I just need to buy new ink cartridges – I don’t even have a black one anymore, and the color one is completely empty.
*When it was effing up, it managed to digest a piece of paper. As in, the paper went in, and not all of it came out, and I never saw the missing pieces again. Until the other day.
File Under: General
4 Comments
HAHA! My damned printer does the same crap with printing at funny angles, although I KNOW there is no pen stuck in it! I just have to sit there and feed each piece of paper into it so it prints on a nice straight line.
That’s hilarious, though.
Oh man! How funny/sad that all this time it was just a silly pen, making your printer look as though it were a retard. I’m happy that it still works though. Woo! It was a good printer when it served us… May it never have to see another ball point pen in its lovely mechanical life.
Haha, that is seriously the most curious printer-problem I’ve ever heard of. I DID NOT know that a ball-point pen could ever get stuck in a printer. Nope, not until I read your post. Thankfully I don’t keep any junk piled on top of my printer!
hoowww bizarre.
My printers are always cursed – they tend to break a month after buying them O_o
At the moment I’m suffering through a printer who refuses to print any of the inks but the black, and a muzzy blue. So I can’t do much with colour O_o