I is for Ink Cartridges

R.a.n.t. for day 04/10/15

When I was a young writer starting out, I didn't have a computer like the ones available today. Computers were expensive and out of my Taco Bell salary price range, which is where I worked during my High School years. Most of my writing was done on a typewriter. (For you kids, a typewriter was a miraculous machine equipped with keys which when pressed printed whatever you typed automatically to a piece of paper. No need to save and print. And the typewriter never 'crashed' losing half a days typing because you were foolish and never saved. Hands up everyone that's happened to.) I didn't mind typing on a typewriter, I actually liked it. And when I got my first one I felt more like a writer than ever before. But the drawback is you can't go back and correct so easily. That's what's nice about typing on a computer. You type away for as long as you want, save the file, print it out, edit, print again, save once more, work on it again, etc. etc.

Working with the computer isn't so bad either, except when it gets to the printing part. It's a process that has begun to anger me greatly and thus resulted in not printing much of my writings lately. If I were smrt I would print out each and every one of my r.a.n.t.s, make a few choice selections and possibly see if they are interesting or humorous enough for publication. But I'm dreaming again because I hate talking about ink cartridges and I'm wandering in my r.a.n.t. again. That's how much talking about ink angers me. Why can I go to the local Office store and pick up a fairly decent all-in-one printer for about $100 and yet when I need to pick up new ink for it, (which seems every other week), I'm shelling out $40 for various cartridges. Even when I try to print only in black, the other colours seem to drain. And can ink really be that expensive? I can only imagine what a gallon of ink would cost.

I've also come to believe ink cartridges are sort of a legal scam. Did you know when most ink cartridges are 'out of ink' they are only partially out of ink? I've come to learn that the printer and ink cartridge are so smrt now, they conspire against you. Whatever printer you have, you can look online for cheats on how to extend the life of your ink cartridge. Most printers have a sensor that scans the ink cartridge for when it is 'low' and flags that it is empty. And then the printer refuses to print. A little trick I learned is to cover the sensor with black electrical tape and suddenly the printer sees it as a full cartridge and I extend the life by almost half. So when the printer says you are low or out of ink, it's lying, it's trying to scam you. And this is one scam artists I can't mess with.

Some questions for discussion:
Have you ever lost a portion of a story or article because you forgot to save?
How is your friendship with ink cartridges?
Did you notice I spelled the word smart wrong both times? That was planned.

Some other related articles:
I learn how to get free gas HERE
I correspond with and mess with an actual scammer HERE