Alexander's Ragtime Snit
Sep. 10th, 2009 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogEverybody's both destined and required to have a Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day once in awhile. Today was mine.
It began with another of my 3 a.m. Up All Night things, where my brain got serious going and assorted prancing animals did nothing to help. By 7 or so, I knew I needed to get cracking on the paperwork for Insurance Plan #5 that had to be into Eleanor's old employment office today. She signed the forms, I quickly completed them (half the damn thing was an exact duplicate of #3), I plugged in the printer to run the fax cover page, and....
THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR TRI-COLOR CARTRIDGE.
THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR BLACK CARTRIDGE.
Said problem(s) not only prevented the printage, the damn thing wouldn't even work as a fax machine until the issue got resolved. And boy howdy did I know exactly what the problem was.
You see, I did not create that "exact duplicate" of a prior application through the efforts of a medieval scribe. No, I photocopied them, using that very multifunction printer-copier and, of necessity, using those same cartridges. But as soon as I interfaced printer with PC, some sort of proprietary thing flowed through that umbilical and instantly taught the printer to search for, and reject, the two aftermarket print cartridges I've been using in there for months. I tried various remedies- uninstalling the updater, plugging in older (if empty) Genuine HP Parts, and nothing worked- except a trip to Office Max to replace the two of their brandage with my two new brand-name best friends. (Somewhere in there, a guy in Bangalore informed me it would cost me $39 plus tax for him to troubleshoot my unit, or $200 for a protection package (didn't those used to be called condoms?, I almost asked him) when the fucking printer cost me $100 in the first place?!?) Not surprisingly, it printed right out, so my medical fax and a wasted morning's work got out the door in a timely manner.
Or rather, it did, but it took much longer to get back in the door. We had an overturned oil tanker on the 290, barely a mile from our house, that must've rolled over sometime just before 1 this afternoon; I didn't hear a word about it on either sports talk or Ed Shults, but I sure could tell that every major street to and from my office was majorly backed up. Turns out that even though it was off the main highway proper (on the exit from 290 east to Main Street east, which crosses the highway on an elevated ramp), it was jet fuel, and everyone was afraid of some jamoche incinerating himself underneath it, one of the worst-designed and most accident-prone major expressway splits I've ever seen, so they shut the whole thing. By the time I left the office a bit before 3, every road was backed up, and even the sidestreets were full of cranky lost buttheads, including one who damn near plowed his SUV into my car when he had a stop sign and I didn't. I'll check the news in a few to see if it's cleared up or if there were any injuries.
As opposed to deaths- a client died and his nephew just called to tell me, and the Buffalo-area Marine who died in an Afghan ambush the other day is, quite possibly, related to one of the nicest other attorneys in my office.
All that left was uploading the documents I'd spent the morning writing and the early afternoon mailing. Guess what? The scanning component of the HP machine wasn't working anymore! Five reboots, numerous reloads of disks and drivers and endless cursing later, it's still misbehaving, but if you know which onscreen button does what without it having a label on it, you can get a document scanned and turned into a .pdf.
When you're looking forward to tomorrow being a better day and "tomorrow," in this case, is September 11th, you know it was pretty damn bad.
It began with another of my 3 a.m. Up All Night things, where my brain got serious going and assorted prancing animals did nothing to help. By 7 or so, I knew I needed to get cracking on the paperwork for Insurance Plan #5 that had to be into Eleanor's old employment office today. She signed the forms, I quickly completed them (half the damn thing was an exact duplicate of #3), I plugged in the printer to run the fax cover page, and....
THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR TRI-COLOR CARTRIDGE.
THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR BLACK CARTRIDGE.
Said problem(s) not only prevented the printage, the damn thing wouldn't even work as a fax machine until the issue got resolved. And boy howdy did I know exactly what the problem was.
You see, I did not create that "exact duplicate" of a prior application through the efforts of a medieval scribe. No, I photocopied them, using that very multifunction printer-copier and, of necessity, using those same cartridges. But as soon as I interfaced printer with PC, some sort of proprietary thing flowed through that umbilical and instantly taught the printer to search for, and reject, the two aftermarket print cartridges I've been using in there for months. I tried various remedies- uninstalling the updater, plugging in older (if empty) Genuine HP Parts, and nothing worked- except a trip to Office Max to replace the two of their brandage with my two new brand-name best friends. (Somewhere in there, a guy in Bangalore informed me it would cost me $39 plus tax for him to troubleshoot my unit, or $200 for a protection package (didn't those used to be called condoms?, I almost asked him) when the fucking printer cost me $100 in the first place?!?) Not surprisingly, it printed right out, so my medical fax and a wasted morning's work got out the door in a timely manner.
Or rather, it did, but it took much longer to get back in the door. We had an overturned oil tanker on the 290, barely a mile from our house, that must've rolled over sometime just before 1 this afternoon; I didn't hear a word about it on either sports talk or Ed Shults, but I sure could tell that every major street to and from my office was majorly backed up. Turns out that even though it was off the main highway proper (on the exit from 290 east to Main Street east, which crosses the highway on an elevated ramp), it was jet fuel, and everyone was afraid of some jamoche incinerating himself underneath it, one of the worst-designed and most accident-prone major expressway splits I've ever seen, so they shut the whole thing. By the time I left the office a bit before 3, every road was backed up, and even the sidestreets were full of cranky lost buttheads, including one who damn near plowed his SUV into my car when he had a stop sign and I didn't. I'll check the news in a few to see if it's cleared up or if there were any injuries.
As opposed to deaths- a client died and his nephew just called to tell me, and the Buffalo-area Marine who died in an Afghan ambush the other day is, quite possibly, related to one of the nicest other attorneys in my office.
All that left was uploading the documents I'd spent the morning writing and the early afternoon mailing. Guess what? The scanning component of the HP machine wasn't working anymore! Five reboots, numerous reloads of disks and drivers and endless cursing later, it's still misbehaving, but if you know which onscreen button does what without it having a label on it, you can get a document scanned and turned into a .pdf.
When you're looking forward to tomorrow being a better day and "tomorrow," in this case, is September 11th, you know it was pretty damn bad.
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Date: 2009-09-10 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-11 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-11 03:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-11 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-11 12:32 pm (UTC)My dog has fleas.
Mairzy doats and doazy doats and I'll be home for Christmas.
Your loving son,
Queen Victoria.