Living in Printer Hell

We have an event tomorrow - a booth at the Soroptimists Women's Show at the Fair Grounds. They're very kind and give booth space to lots of the non profits, including us.

If you'd asked me yesterday, I would have said I had about 90 minutes worth of things to do and would have it all set up. Well, I got up at 5 a.m. and got home after set up about 8:15 p.m. Things didn't go quite as smoothly as I had planned.

I did have breakfast with Greg at Skaets and dinner at the anchor, but didn't even take time for lunch. Printers and I have not been on good terms today.

I am going to offer a Gratitude Journaling Workshop in May through the MHA and so I wanted to put together a little flyer for it. Also, one for our upcoming rummage sale and one for the garden tour. These are not major projects - it's all I got done all day. lol

Well, that's not true, I worked on my United Way presentation this morning for an hour or so and printed it out to take a fresh look at it later.

Anyway, I got ready to print the flyers and sent it to my pretty new Brother MFC 210C printer and did not hear the paper pulling through the machine, but instead heard this horrible grinding. I got online, they said to look for a foreign object in the machine. I turned it upside down, literally, and found nothing. So, eventually I called support and I have to say I got the BEST support I've ever gotten - we did a reset and it was still a problem so... they're sending me a completely new machine. I wish they would teach the Circuit City service people - don't buy those service contracts, they're a complete waste of money - and the Compaq/HP people about customer service.

The last time I dealt with them I finally told the guy, "Look, I can appreciate that your English is exceptional - but I am having a hard time understanding your accent and I just cannot devote 75% of my attention to figuring out what you're telling me to do and only 25% to the very complex matter of working on my computer and trying to not make it into a paperweight. Transfer me to someone else, please."

The woman at Brother was a native English speaker and offered an immediate, and very good, solution. I will remember that the next time I'm in the market for a product.

Well... anyway... back to the problem at hand... getting my flyers out of the computer and into hard copy. No problem. I happen to have a second printer. So, I load it up. It prints about 10 pages and says the ink is out. No problem. I keep an extra cartridge on hand. I put it in and the paper comes out blank. Apparently, it's dried up.

So, I got to visit Office Max. By now it's afternoon. I still have to go to the office and gather up materials for tomorrow and I've made plans to meet people at Anchor Inn for dinner. Well, fast forward to the part where at 5:23 I'm leaving my office and going to dinner and setting up after that. Apparently I had a little more than 90 minutes worth of stuff to do.

Dinner was nice - Andrea, Teresa, Debbie and Jocelyn came. Lots of folks are out of town this weekend. Debbie and I both headed out to the fair grounds for more set up afterwards.

I'm really fortunate that three of my board members are working tomorrow, so I only have to do the last couple hours of the day and break down. It gets to be a really long day if you're there by yourself all day. Hopefully it will go well. This is a big show and it's usually very well attended.