The Printer War

I recently bought a new Brother printer.

This was a mistake.

My mistake was believing that printing something would involve pressing PRINT.

Those days are gone.

Today, before a printer will print a paragraph, it apparently wants to know who you are, where you live, whether you have Bluetooth, whether you have Wi-Fi, whether you have an account, whether you remember your password, whether you have installed several hundred megabytes of software, and possibly whether your grandparents entered the country legally.

I merely wanted to print an email.

Several hours later, I had learned more about printer drivers than I had ever wanted to know.

Brother’s support system eventually connected me with a woman in Jamaica.

She and I began the conversation as two civilized human beings.

This did not last.

She wanted me to perform increasingly delicate operations using tiny buttons on the printer and an electronic window roughly the size of a postage stamp.

At my age, anything smaller than a grape seed should not be an essential component of international communications.

At one point I was apparently expected to enter passwords containing upper-case letters, lower-case letters and numbers by repeatedly pushing buttons while staring into this tiny window.

This was not printer installation.

This was an escape room.

The woman in Jamaica became increasingly irritated with me.

I became increasingly irritated with Brother.

And somewhere during this exchange I realized something important.

She wasn’t really angry at me.

She was angry at the same thing I was angry at.

The system.

Large companies now create enormously complicated products and then put human beings at the very bottom of the corporate food chain in charge of explaining them.

These people did not design the software.

They did not write the instructions.

They did not decide that a printer needed 412 megabytes of software before it could put “Dear Fred” onto a sheet of paper.

But every day they must explain this machinery to bewildered customers.

Eventually the customers begin to look like the enemy.

And the support people begin to look like the enemy to the customers.

Meanwhile, the executives who designed the whole arrangement are presumably at a retreat somewhere discussing customer satisfaction.

After several hours, I gave up.

The next morning, assisted by ChatGPT, I went back into battle.

We tried something wonderfully old-fashioned.

We thought about the problem.

The printer was connected to my Lenovo laptop by a cable.

Windows could see it.

So instead of poking more microscopic buttons, we found the printer in Windows and told it to print a test page.

It printed beautifully.

Great balls of fire.

There it was.

A perfect sheet of paper informing me that I had “correctly installed” something called a Microsoft IPP Class Driver.

I had no idea what an IPP Class Driver was.

I still don’t.

But I loved it.

If it had been a person, I would have bought it lunch.

We had proved something important: the printer worked. The computer worked. The cable worked. The toner worked. The paper worked. The driver worked.

Naturally, I then opened Gmail and tried to print an email.

Windows announced:

THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOUR PRINTER.

There wasn’t.

We finally discovered the problem.

Somewhere in the electronic undergrowth, Windows had more than one printer available.

Gmail was sending my email to the wrong printer.

I selected the correct one.

Click.

Whirr.

Out came the email.

Perfectly.

I printed another.

Perfect.

And another.

Perfect.

After hours of drivers, passwords, downloads, flashing Wi-Fi lights, Brother utilities, deep sleep, mysterious menus and my deteriorating diplomatic relations with Jamaica, the solution was:

Pick the right printer.

This may be the defining technological lesson of our age.

Our machines have become astonishingly intelligent.

Unfortunately, the systems surrounding them have become so complicated that humans can spend half a day trying to repair a machine that isn’t broken.

And somewhere tonight, a weary technical-support person is probably being shouted at by an 84-year-old man whose printer works perfectly.

Neither of them is the problem.

They’re just two hostages trying to escape from the same software.

As for my Brother printer, it is now sitting quietly beside my computer.

It prints beautifully.

We have established diplomatic relations.

But I am keeping the box.

ps — if you want to see the curious ending to this adventure, click here