I’ve done a lot of manly things in my day–building houses, operating heavy machinery, replacing transmissions–but there’s one thing that a lot of people consider a “man job” that I don’t think I have ever done successfully. And that’s installing a piece of computer hardware without having to call tech support.
I’m just old enough that I was able to make it through college hardly ever using a computer. Nobody had personal computers in those days, and I sure as hell didn’t want to hang around the computer lab (where I couldn’t even smoke) all night writing papers when I had a perfectly good typewriter in my dorm room.
So, even though I use computers constantly these days, I don’t have much in the way of high-tech instincts, since I didn’t grow up in the digital age. Just as I am shocked when a guy doesn’t know how to drive a nail or turn a wrench, my younger friends, and even my wife, don’t understand why I can’t just figure out how to do things on the computer by noodling around with the machine and following some basic principles of computer operation.
It’s because of this background that I was dreading setting up my HP Photosmart Plus, and had avoided it for several weeks after I received the printer.
My fears were misplaced though, because the setup went smoothly. At every turn, I was sure I would encounter an error message and have to get on the horn with Bangalore; but the wireless setup required nothing more difficult than entering the password for the network, and the software for the computer only demanded clicking on the “continue” button a bunch of times.
The feature I was most excited about on this machine was printing photos. We have a very sad situation with photos at our house. We have boxes and boxes of old photos in the most inaccessible corner of our storage area under the stairs. And we have thousands of digital pictures on our computers. But we hardly have any photos on display in our house. We have acres of bare walls in the addition that we built when we found out we were having twins, and we have dozens of empty or mostly empty photo albums that we never got around to filling. So I was hoping that this printer would produce copies that looked good enough to frame or at least put into albums.
But I decided to start small. One of the main reasons I want to get photos around the house is so that the girls will be familiar with their relatives who live far away. They love identifying my wife and me in the few pictures we do have on the walls and in albums; so I wanted to make sure they saw pictures of their grandparents and aunts and uncles too.
One thing the twins do that’s really pretty sad is to thumb through our photo albums that only have two or three shots in them. So after I set up the printer, I ran off some copies of pictures of the grandparents, using the 4×6 photo paper samples that came with the printer, with the idea of filling up some of these lonely scrapbooks.
The results were pretty good. They didn’t quite look like they came out of the darkroom, and I don’t know if I would really put them in a frame, but they are definitely good enough to put into an album which will inevitably be bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated by the girls.
Alas, my little experiment with the new printer ended as so many of my techy endeavors do: with me cursing and shaking my fist at the machine, flecking the monitor with the spittle of Luddite rage.
I had decided to try and run off some larger copies of pictures and evaluate their frame-worthiness, using some photo paper we had gotten about four printers ago, but I kept getting a message telling me that there was no paper in the printer.
There was clearly. Paper. In. The. Printer.
And I couldn’t open the help function on the printer window or go to the HP website because it was after 11:00 p.m. and my 4-year old Macbook gets very sleepy around then and can’t do more than one thing at a time. A few attempts at discovering what I was doing wrong only yielded the Color Wheel of Doom and multiple “a script is not responding” messages.
So I decided that I would cut my losses and turn the printer off until my computer and I were both rested enough to face the challenges of learning new things. In the meantime, at least we can keep drilling the girls about who these strange people in the little photo album are, so they don’t run screaming the next time they see them in real life.
*Update: The morning after I wrote this, I was unable to print anything. I spent over an hour on the phone with HP tech support (Toronto, not Bangalore). It was my computer’s fault, not the printer’s, and the nice lady held my hand and got me printing again. I felt so confident having successfully done something computer-y that I synced my iPhone to iTunes, and in the process lost over 800 photos and videos, 99% of them of my kids. Good times.
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