Holy oozing maggot cheese have I been wading through the molasses-in-December quagmire of a technology nightmare lately.
My printer suddenly started complaining about a phantom paper jam even though there’s no paper even near it. At first I thought it was simply faking it to garner attention since I haven’t been printing much lately. I checked to make sure that none of the cats puked in the paper feed. I cleaned, cleared, examined, prodded, poked, pleaded and yelled. I am now utterly convinced that, like the expensive ink cartridges that leak and smudge and ruin about twenty prints every time you print if you don’t use it every other day, this is just some hidden code built in to my Canon Pixma MP210 so that, if I don’t print at least 20 pages a month, it breaks itself. At the very least, I’ve wasted a brand new print cartridge and have to send this hunk of cursed plastic to the demons at the service center so they can charge me to reset a dip-switch. At most, I’m forced to buy a whole new printer. I’m thinking Epson.
Soon after that, my new Bluetooth headphones arrived from Newegg. I got the LG HBS-200s which are comfortable, cheap and sound pretty damn good. I didn’t know that until about thirty minutes ago since I couldn’t get the damn things to work with my phone, which was the main reason I had bought them. See, my old phone recently started acting like that guy at the party with the fake tan, gold chains and C. Everett Douche chinstrap beard, which is to say, an asshole. This was my T-Mobile Shadow, a phone that was touted as a cross between HAL 2000 and a Star Trek Communicator. Since my somewhat recent ‘upgrade’ to Vista I shouldn’t have been shocked to learn that any device running a flavor of Windows would be problematic. I didn’t think it would take three separate in-warranty replacements due to some of the weirdest, screwed up software failures before I decided to get a different phone. I won’t go into it here since I have a new phone to bitch about but let me just say that if you have the choice between a phone running Windows Mobile, like the Shadow, and a dung rimmed Dixie cup with a string in the end, I’d invest in some Q-Tips and Listerine. (more…)
