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captainsblogNot a very catchy song, but it gets in some of the highlights and lowlights of the past few days.
Late last year, my office copier began shitting the bed, and the final repair I got done for it under its expiring service contract resulted in even more bedshit. Rather than fight with the service company or the big red X, I discovered that a replacement copier would only cost a few hundred bucks, likely less than the cost of upcoming (and uncovered) repairs on the old one. It showed up in January, and after some serious room-making both there and at home, the plan was to move the rather huge but still sort-of-functional old one to my home office. Plans were made to do it the weekend an officemate was moving house and had a truck and all,.... which turned out to be Quarantine Day One. So the ol' 5225 just sits in the hallway outside my inner office, taking up space.
That is, until last week. The new one popped a "low toner" warning barely four months into its life, and a day later shut down its printing function completely, with annoying beeps and boops to remind me to replace it. I should have realized that the relatively low price included only a "starter cartridge" of toner, to get you just past the no-questions-asked return period before discovering that each high-capacity toner cartridge retails for roughly half the price of the entire copier.
There's nothing unusual about this: home printer sellers started this racket ages ago, practically giving away the hardware in exchange for a lifetime pipeline to the ink that retails, ounce for ounce, for more than Chanel No. 5. For a time, you could beat this through buying knockoff ink brands or refilled cartridges, but the manufacturers have now digital-rights-managed the devices to detect anything other than The Real Thing™, at a minimum annoying the shit out of you with nag screens and in some cases threatening to void warranties if you use anything else or even K-cupping you out of being able to use the thing at all. But I got lucky: an online seller had a high-capacity Genuine Xerox Toner™ for the unit for a mere 50 bucks, well under half the rack rate for it, just because the outer box had been opened. My only hesitation was in signing up for an account with them: I use relatively little in the way of office equipment, get almost all of it from brick-and-mortar local outlets, and the one recent time I ordered a one-off item from an online seller, I got inundated with paper catalogs, cold calls from my "representative" and daily "deals" and survey requests in my mailbox. I decided to sidetrack all of that by giving them a disposable email address that I use for things like newspaper websites. Unfortunately, that email name overwrote my actual office address on the order, so this is what showed up several days later:
Yes, I'm twelve. At least it got here, and it works fine (even properly giving the damn "Genuine Xerox Toner" alert I see 30 times a day). Now the only question is how many credit card offers Holden is gonna get at my office; I'm already throwing out several a week addressed to former clients who are dead, bankrupt and/or in prison.
Until it showed up, I managed through a small amount of home printing (this old thing needs to have its printheads cleaned six times each time I use it), through a coworker letting me send some specialty jobs to her copier, and, thankfully, through that old beast of mine left for dead in the hallway which still put out passable copies until the new toner arrived. Which it did just in time: state courts are reopening on a limited basis, I have another new bankruptcy intake tomorrow, three from the last couple of weeks are moving forward and my first this month just got filed.
----
In part due to that busy-ness, I finally got On The Road Again late last week with my first trip in over two months that took me east of Clarence, our immediately adjacent town, to Beyond Here Be Dragons, formerly known as Rochester. My only stops were my office there, and two clients' restaurants, to go over paperwork and pick up takeout to support their businesses. The office was a surreal experience: of the family that works there (the firm-name lawyer, his wife and kids), one kid has almost certainly had the virus, the wife probably hasn't but is seriously immunocompromised, and the lawyer is an almost full-on COVIDenier but plays along due to wife and kid. I did notice that there's a dog-grooming place next door that had customers padding in and out; Pepper's gone groomless for close to three months now, so I've got a call into them to see if she can come with next time I go there. Someone promptly asked me if I thought the dog groomer could sneak them in for a haircut. I replied, I checked on that, and they said they'd do it if I brought my rabies certificate and agreed to a flea bath first.
The drive there and back also had its surreal moments. Billboard ads are way down as a result of all the shutdowns, so their owners are replacing them with public service announcements. I'm rather sick of the ones about car seats and forest fires, but this actual FEMA one struck me as really well done:
Less well done was the thought of this product; didn't see a billboard, but a license plate frame with the website:
And worst of all was the newest local variation on the Cheeto re-election campaign, out in MAGAsshole country between here and Rochester. "Keep America Great" isn't really a viable slogan for them right now, so there's a new one that says "Keep America American." And that's within a couple miles of an Indian rez; the irony, it bleeds.
I need to talk and read about this less, just to keep my BP manageable. I was unfriended yesterday over a pandemic debate; the poster, upset that Erie County is being delayed in reopening because its hospital admissions and COVID deaths are still not decreasing, put up one of those "I can't wait anymore this is so unfair I want to move to Florida" things. This, from someone who is still collecting a fulltime public paycheck with a Tier I state pension. I tried to find common ground and got banhammered. Usually I take these very badly because I'm afraid I offended someone. Not this time.
On the other hand, the tributes and appreciation are inspiring, if not always all that well thought out. This was on a lawn near home:
causing me to wonder, is elementary school too soon to be introducing them to condoms?
TOLD you I was twelve.
----
While our dog park remains closed, we continued our Sunday tour of some of the less-traveled town facilities, this time heading to the northeast reaches in a place called Paradise Park:
Yes, Ursula, you own it. And from there, as our friend Jake arrived, it dawned on me,....
They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.
Not much to the park itself- mostly soccer fields and a shutdown playground, but it does have other attractions for the local drunken teenagers:
Hey, at least they're nice enough to Buy Local. Next to the park, though, we discovered an unpaved trail along its eastern edge heading quite a bit north of its boundaries; we thought it might be from an abandoned rail line, but another dog walker said it had once had power lines running over it. It was a good hour and a couple of miles in, on a nice spring day. Rain is forecast, but we got our social distanced exercise in....
and best of all, I can post all of this without having to print anything out.
Late last year, my office copier began shitting the bed, and the final repair I got done for it under its expiring service contract resulted in even more bedshit. Rather than fight with the service company or the big red X, I discovered that a replacement copier would only cost a few hundred bucks, likely less than the cost of upcoming (and uncovered) repairs on the old one. It showed up in January, and after some serious room-making both there and at home, the plan was to move the rather huge but still sort-of-functional old one to my home office. Plans were made to do it the weekend an officemate was moving house and had a truck and all,.... which turned out to be Quarantine Day One. So the ol' 5225 just sits in the hallway outside my inner office, taking up space.
That is, until last week. The new one popped a "low toner" warning barely four months into its life, and a day later shut down its printing function completely, with annoying beeps and boops to remind me to replace it. I should have realized that the relatively low price included only a "starter cartridge" of toner, to get you just past the no-questions-asked return period before discovering that each high-capacity toner cartridge retails for roughly half the price of the entire copier.
There's nothing unusual about this: home printer sellers started this racket ages ago, practically giving away the hardware in exchange for a lifetime pipeline to the ink that retails, ounce for ounce, for more than Chanel No. 5. For a time, you could beat this through buying knockoff ink brands or refilled cartridges, but the manufacturers have now digital-rights-managed the devices to detect anything other than The Real Thing™, at a minimum annoying the shit out of you with nag screens and in some cases threatening to void warranties if you use anything else or even K-cupping you out of being able to use the thing at all. But I got lucky: an online seller had a high-capacity Genuine Xerox Toner™ for the unit for a mere 50 bucks, well under half the rack rate for it, just because the outer box had been opened. My only hesitation was in signing up for an account with them: I use relatively little in the way of office equipment, get almost all of it from brick-and-mortar local outlets, and the one recent time I ordered a one-off item from an online seller, I got inundated with paper catalogs, cold calls from my "representative" and daily "deals" and survey requests in my mailbox. I decided to sidetrack all of that by giving them a disposable email address that I use for things like newspaper websites. Unfortunately, that email name overwrote my actual office address on the order, so this is what showed up several days later:
Yes, I'm twelve. At least it got here, and it works fine (even properly giving the damn "Genuine Xerox Toner" alert I see 30 times a day). Now the only question is how many credit card offers Holden is gonna get at my office; I'm already throwing out several a week addressed to former clients who are dead, bankrupt and/or in prison.
Until it showed up, I managed through a small amount of home printing (this old thing needs to have its printheads cleaned six times each time I use it), through a coworker letting me send some specialty jobs to her copier, and, thankfully, through that old beast of mine left for dead in the hallway which still put out passable copies until the new toner arrived. Which it did just in time: state courts are reopening on a limited basis, I have another new bankruptcy intake tomorrow, three from the last couple of weeks are moving forward and my first this month just got filed.
----
In part due to that busy-ness, I finally got On The Road Again late last week with my first trip in over two months that took me east of Clarence, our immediately adjacent town, to Beyond Here Be Dragons, formerly known as Rochester. My only stops were my office there, and two clients' restaurants, to go over paperwork and pick up takeout to support their businesses. The office was a surreal experience: of the family that works there (the firm-name lawyer, his wife and kids), one kid has almost certainly had the virus, the wife probably hasn't but is seriously immunocompromised, and the lawyer is an almost full-on COVIDenier but plays along due to wife and kid. I did notice that there's a dog-grooming place next door that had customers padding in and out; Pepper's gone groomless for close to three months now, so I've got a call into them to see if she can come with next time I go there. Someone promptly asked me if I thought the dog groomer could sneak them in for a haircut. I replied, I checked on that, and they said they'd do it if I brought my rabies certificate and agreed to a flea bath first.
The drive there and back also had its surreal moments. Billboard ads are way down as a result of all the shutdowns, so their owners are replacing them with public service announcements. I'm rather sick of the ones about car seats and forest fires, but this actual FEMA one struck me as really well done:
Less well done was the thought of this product; didn't see a billboard, but a license plate frame with the website:
And worst of all was the newest local variation on the Cheeto re-election campaign, out in MAGAsshole country between here and Rochester. "Keep America Great" isn't really a viable slogan for them right now, so there's a new one that says "Keep America American." And that's within a couple miles of an Indian rez; the irony, it bleeds.
I need to talk and read about this less, just to keep my BP manageable. I was unfriended yesterday over a pandemic debate; the poster, upset that Erie County is being delayed in reopening because its hospital admissions and COVID deaths are still not decreasing, put up one of those "I can't wait anymore this is so unfair I want to move to Florida" things. This, from someone who is still collecting a fulltime public paycheck with a Tier I state pension. I tried to find common ground and got banhammered. Usually I take these very badly because I'm afraid I offended someone. Not this time.
On the other hand, the tributes and appreciation are inspiring, if not always all that well thought out. This was on a lawn near home:
causing me to wonder, is elementary school too soon to be introducing them to condoms?
TOLD you I was twelve.
----
While our dog park remains closed, we continued our Sunday tour of some of the less-traveled town facilities, this time heading to the northeast reaches in a place called Paradise Park:
Yes, Ursula, you own it. And from there, as our friend Jake arrived, it dawned on me,....
They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.
Not much to the park itself- mostly soccer fields and a shutdown playground, but it does have other attractions for the local drunken teenagers:
Hey, at least they're nice enough to Buy Local. Next to the park, though, we discovered an unpaved trail along its eastern edge heading quite a bit north of its boundaries; we thought it might be from an abandoned rail line, but another dog walker said it had once had power lines running over it. It was a good hour and a couple of miles in, on a nice spring day. Rain is forecast, but we got our social distanced exercise in....
and best of all, I can post all of this without having to print anything out.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-18 06:37 am (UTC)