Jeff DeGrave
So here we are: day whatever of the Coronamadness. We have moved from the natural world into sanitized zones of plastic, latex, and virtuality. Our desire to work, talk, and communicate with our fellow shuttered humans has never been more subject to the capabilities—and incapabilities—of modern technology. Enter: my all-in-none printer: the Epson XP-640.
Eppie and I fell in love three years ago. There she was—a humble bottom-feeder, but capable of actualizing print commands through the ether, all the while comporting herself in a space well within regulation breadbox size. She was “wireless, creative, and superior”—with an external tray dedicated to photo paper and DVD covers. She could do it all: print, copy, and scan—and even fax in times of pure desperation. It was time to take her home. And introduce her to my wife. And dog.
At first, we all got along. Eppie’s 10 color prints per minute were clearly right out of the 21st century. Compared to our previous printing assistant, the HP Laser Jet 4000—a machine that somehow simultaneously emoted the very best of Gutenberg and Battlestar Galactica—Eppie generated 600 dpi color prints beyond our wildest Pantone imaginations. All the while free of notable dot gain. Life was good and we were all printing happily together.
Until one day things changed. Eppie’s diseased intentions began to reveal themselves. The dog was first to sniff out all of her “late night updates” and her surreptitious “illegal firmware protocol activity.” The relentless all-hour screeching and chattering was unbearable. And during the day she had morphed into some sort of infected technological alien mercilessly devouring reams of helpless paper between her suffocating idler rollers. Her crossmember engine controller eventually became unhinged. And finally, one day, her Crucial CT12872AF53E 1GB 533MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM PC2-4200 was no longer fully buffered. And all the printing stopped.
We decided to look into Eppie’s past to see if others had been duped by her “expression premium” and lab-quality custom borderless capabilities. We were not alone. She had gone state-to-state and town-to-town luring in one suitor after the next with her seemingly harmless 2.7 inch LCD command display and cutting-edge duplex printing. An outraged Washingtonian asserted that her “touch screen interface was not friendly.” A New Yorker cried out into cyberspace, “Shame on you for your deceptive and underhanded business practices!” While a desperate woman from California stated he would use Eppie “as a doorstop or scour the Internet for some shady way to roll back the newest firmware update.”
After weeks of sitting idly in our homes, we finally rid ourselves of Eppie this morning—along with her equally unscrupulous soulmates Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Noir 310. Our house of three in quarantine now seems stunningly spacious and screechless and cozy. We talk about life before the madness. And afterward. And the stunning full color borderless images that our new “superior and versatile” XP-7100 might be printing for us very, very soon.
Jeff DeGrave is a writer and world traveler.