Mac Retardation #5: Printer

Oh boy, oh boy, major Mac retardation #5 coming up!! I'm excited! Aren't you excited!! We're starting early today!

So I was trying to print my flight itinerary for Thanksgiving, because we have no printer at home and JetBlue believes in self-check-in so I need to print it. I turn on the printer, tell the Mac to go to it. It prints about 3/4 of the page and then the machine stops. I poke around, confused. The printer thinks it's printing. The Mac thinks it's printing. But nothing is happening.

I cancel the print job and tell it to restart. Nothing happens. The printer program informs me that all printing has been stopped, would I like to restart it? Yes.

The next four successive times I attempted to print, I didn't even get the first line, in that irritating way printers have of putting juuuust enough ink on the page to ruin it, and then stopping. The Mac told me that I am giving it the command to stop the printing even though I am in fact sitting here watching as the happy print-progress-bar begins to move and then withers and dies.

Edit: I restarted the computer and ascertained that it is, indeed, a problem with the Mac and not the printer, because using the printer controls I can make it print test pages just fine, but try to make it print a test page through the Mac? FAIL.

Humorous News: Props today to the Metro, even though there is a reason it is free, and the reason is that its ink is far more virulent than any avian flu. They get points because

A) There is a cute picture of a mama lion with a cub in her mouth,
B) Their description of the Goblet of Fire movie was, "The studio is praying the fourth time will be the charm for this struggling franchise. OK, kidding! If anything, the Warner bees hope there are no injuries when a gazillion Potter loyalists stampede the box office on opening weekend."
C) They featured a book today, description as follows, "If you're interested in learning about nine presidents who had hooks for hands or the six essential qualities of a professional writer (one of which is the ability to describe facial hair accurately) or if you've always longed for a list of 700 hobo names, John Hodgman's 'The Areas of my Expertise' deserves a spot in your bathroom."

Apparently, Rhode Island's nickname is "Lil' Rhodie, the Little State That's Full of Absinthe Friends", and the Mall of America is "so bright I don't know how they get the giant bats to keep circling it."

I'm going to buy that book now.

Mac Retardation #5...5

We have a scanner that doesn't work. No on switch - no install software - no way to connect to it. It's dead or in a coma or something. I told my bosses when they bought their new iMac G5s to get a scanner also. Instead they came back with a printer/scanner/copier that they planned to install in their office.

I went to them after the printer debacle and suggested I still needed a scanner; after a moment, the intended result filtered in, and I had a new printer/scanner/copier.

I took it out of the box.

For the last four hours, ever since then, I have been non-stop on the phone with tech support trying to make it work.

The printer's fine.

But the Mac won't acknowledge it. And the software seems to have drivers for every kind of HP printer conceivable.

Except this one.

And four hours later, we still can't make anything work.

This problem would have been finished four hours ago on a PC.