All I Wanted To Do

All I wanted to do was print up some music. I'm doing an accompaniment for a baritone on New Year's Day, and he e-mailed me some *.pdf files of the music for the show. I just wanted to print it out.

So, I went to my office, but the printer wasn't there, because my wife started a new store and needed the printer to print out credit card receipts over there.

And I grabbed the laptop, and went over to the store. And that's when the machines started ordering me around.

As soon as I plugged in the printer, of course it had never printed from my laptop, so the computer started whining for drivers.

So, i went online and got it some damn drivers.

Then, the computer wanted to update the Firefox, so we got those updates and restarted.

And now, the Adobe reader wanted to update itself, so now we have the new version of that.

And then the printer popped up another box, wanted to register itself. Well, the last thing I needed was an identity crisis from a little gray box that could throw gobs of ink at me, so we said "yes" to registration.

Then, Windows Explorer popped up - the printer wanted to use Explorer to register itself - Firefox wasn't good enough for it!

And since it was the first time I'd used Windows Explorer (why use a crappy browser when you already have a good one?), now Windows Explorer pops up and wants to introduce itself. Finally, I shut down Explorer entirely - enough already! The printer would just have to take up yoga or tai chi to find itself.

I had almost forgotten what I had started the computer for. I tried once again, and this time the printer started to give me my music. There was even a little voice that said "Printing Started" when it started to print. How cute - actually when you think about it, what else is a printer going to do?

Ironically, the first page to print out was "Auld Lang Syne". I guess the computer was sorry, and wanted to let bygones be bygones.

Happy New Year, everybody!



gary