Today is my last day of class before summer break. Two
finials, and two papers to turn in and I am done. The feeling of excitement is
overwhelming.
The finals (knock on wood) will be a piece of delicious
cake. One hundred questions about Literature’s impact on modern writing in my American
lit. class, and one hundred questions on creative writing sentence structure.
Which, if my professor read this blog, I just might fail.
Last night, confident that I had completed my two term
papers early, I went to print my masterpieces. Click-whirl-click.
I heard my printer go through its start-up noises. Then… nothing.
Thinking I was out of paper, I investigated. My happy little printer was
flashing something on its screen. “Printer head fail!” It screamed. “Oh, well…
my ink must be out. After a trip to the Uber-Target I gladly installed fifty
bucks worth of ink. As I closed the lid, it stated, “printer head fail!” Thus
began two hours of downloading new updates from the website, speaking to an
adorable young man named “Keith” from Mumbai, and making the sign of the cross
over my non-compliant/non-Christian printer. After all of that, “Printer head
fail!”
Keith seemed sympathetic to my desperate need to print my a
five page paper based on Hamlet’s
Ophelia descending into madness, yet didn’t comprehend my analogies that my
printer was now, my Hamlet. I even quoted Ophelia’s death monologue to Keith,
as my Lexmark printer was my own personal Hamlet. Driving me mad.
As a non
sequitur, may I make it known that you meet the most interesting
people at Kinko’s around midnight. God I hope that “non sequitur” is on my
finial exam. Along with irony.
Those inkjets are so crappy and unpredictable. I switched to laser years ago and am thankful I did. The bad part is they did to laser printers the same thing they did to inkjets: they practically give away the printer then rape you on the ink/toner.
ReplyDeleteGood luck on your finals :-)
Printers infuriate me. They don't even allow me the satisfaction of jamming wads of paper between their delicate gears and rollers. It's like the nerds in school who wedgie themselves before you can get to them.
ReplyDeleteNot a fan of printers. I just use my office ones
ReplyDeleteI'm more surprised in this day and age any professor would have you print them out and not just email those papers to him in a word or .pdf document.
ReplyDeletehttp://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers
ReplyDelete@Blobby: A lot of faculty members don't accept digital copies of assignments because students can then claim that what was graded wasn't the final version.
ReplyDeleteI can go you one better, though I have to reach back into the dark ages, when PCs were brand-spankin'-new, to do it. Had a class in graduate school where half of one's grade was the final paper (30 pages). The day before it was due, I went up to campus (where we shared one computer for like 30 students) with a marked-up hard copy, to make final edits and print the submission copy (dot matrix, baby!). Edits finished, I hit print. The first couple of pages came out fine, and then it turned to gibberish: the file had gotten corrupted.
ReplyDeleteSince this was back in the day when floppy disks were really floppy, and nobody worried much about data backup, I didn't have a second copy of the file. And the "undo" function didn't work. The file was completely kludged.
So I spent the next eight hours retyping (and trying to reconstruct from memory the on-the-fly edits I'd made while typing in the ones I had noted on the hard copy I had with me) the paper. I've been fanatical about keeping extra copies of the really important stuff ever since.
Non sequitur, I really need to see a pic of you
ReplyDeleteAnd in all that amount of time, you could have just written it out. By hand.
ReplyDeleteBest of luck on finals and a good end of the year!
ReplyDelete