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It is often said that we are living in an era of enlightenment – technological marvels and unprecedented social progress.
After all, we put a man on the moon, connected every person on the planet and can save lives through surgery conducted through a hole the size of a pea. And there is still a border that even the greatest minds are yet to conquer.
I am talking, of course, about the computer printer, a device that has broken the spirit of all the commuters and heart of women who love them.
While science is still sketchy, I would bet that my firstborn, in every second home in central Australia, is broken, in paper or, like the man of the house, mysteriously offline.
Indeed, there is nothing more disheartening for the modern hunter-gatherer than knowing that human beings have been able to put things on paper for more than 2000 years and that suddenly, in 1980s, everything became too difficult.
It is also unfathomable that the use of a computer has become so easy that even my mother can almost do it, but as soon as you press Ctrl + P, you are suddenly overwhelmed by a sea of exclamation points. In the case of an emergency (such as an urgent need to criticize my parenting style), my mother is able to send a halfway email around the world.
Sending a document to a device two meters away is a feat that escapes both.
And then, of course, there is ink.
It is cheaper to fund the sleeves of any Queensland Origin team than to print a tax return. And can anyone tell me why every computer in the world is managed by Windows or Mac but it is essential that there are 800 different types of printer cartridges?
I went to an ink depot and I counted the number of different cartridges for my printer's brand, because that's the kind of quality journalist I am. There were 53 of them.
Fifty – @ # $% – three.
Remember the first days? We were naive.
Surely if we are able to send a 7.8-billion-kilometer spacecraft to seek life on the moons of Saturn, we can find the best plastic cube to hold a half-shot of black liquid .
This question came up the other weekend when, after 12 hours spent trying to repair my printer, I was about to send it too in the ###################################################################################### 39; space.
I opened it, I closed it, I turned it off again and again. And then I realized that I had more ideas. So I ended up dipping into the endless miasma of technical forums, sifting through the messages of people like @ ThunderLord76, until finding a complex set of instructions that involved connecting to a obscure web page and redirect the IP address. Apparently, the HP OfficeJet was designed by Edward Snowden.
But in one way or another, whatever I did. Like the great hunters of the past, I had caught my prey. Of course, no woolly mammoth was involved, but I have no doubt that many people I have dealt with were fat and hairy.
Meanwhile, my four year old son had just stolen my phone and was happy to download the ABBA Greatest Hits. And it was then that my awakening really began: it was not the technology that was obsolete, it was me.
– This article originally appeared in Stellar and is reproduced here with permission.
– Stellar is available in The Sunday News, Sunday Herald Sun and Sunday Mail's Sunday Telegraph. For more information, visit the website.
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