ink

Grumpy. That is a fair word. Feeling like it's the end of the world when in reality; it is all about printer ink.

I made the mistake, a little over a year ago, of buying an affordable inkjet printer. I say mistake because I did not look at how much it would cost to keep that little sucker in ink. Now, because of the newspaper and a few other things I have to print a lot more than I typically do. I thought I was being slick and recycled my long dead color cartridges (I never print color) to get the refund money to apply to black ink. Unfortunately, what they do now is they program the printers so they will not print at all unless all the cartridges are installed. It does not matter if you are only printing black and white; it wants the color ones present as well.

So, I am currently sweating it out to try to fix this situation. I have already missed one deadline for lack of a printer, cannot return the new black ink (because it is opened) so I can pay through the nose to run what I need at Kinko's, it is just stressful. I am going to try a) taping over the sensors (which they say works to fool a LaserJet but may and may not work on an inkjet) and go back to staples and beg and cry for the return of my old, empty cartridges.

The thing is no one makes just a black ink printer anymore and printers have become so affordable because of the cost of ink. Epson was taken to court in a consumer class action suit a few years ago because they set their printers to stop printing and tell you the ink was out long before the ink was out.

I am trying to be more and more of a paperless kind of person, but there are still needs for the printed page.

Oy vey. But it is funny to sit and be aware that all this is dancing around in my head as if it is some kind of disaster. Disruptive, a bit of financial loss - yes - but on the scale of things, really not that bad.

But it fits with several things I have been reading of late that speak of our tendency to place greater emphasis on trying to find meaning in random and temporary events then to look for meaning over the span of time in a more big picture way. We are somewhat hard-wired to do that because we emotionally react before we think and respond, it is an age-old habit that served to keep us safe. People are talking about it now because they are recognizing that this is adversely effecting our business and government leadership - we will throw out someone who has two or three back to back failures and ignore the ten years of success prior and then wonder why they then went on to have more success.

The extremes to which this habit has risen have been squarely correlated to the rise of the whole "be in the moment" and prosperity gospel movement. When you deny that the past and future, as predictive forms are more important and reliably telling then the immediate moment you lose all sense of perspective. And the whole prosperity gospel thing that reduces faith to an act of give and take in the present just reinforces that.

I also woke up to an absolutely empty work queue for my dollar job, which has never happened before. A little more panic, but the reality is I just took the new qualifying tests so I am probably blocked until they have been reviewed (sometime later this morning).

There is a part of me that has been wondering what it would do for America to extend term limits. Right now, with the average being 4 years, we only get a year and a half of a working politician. The first year is them spent parading around either fixing the mess left or finding ways to blame who ever was in office before them. Then we have a nice run of a year and a half of them actually participating, and then lose them to a year and a half of pre-election preparation. I almost think, shoving everyone in for six years and giving them a two term limit in all of politics (does matter what office it is, 12 years is the maximum time that can be served as a politician anywhere) what it would do for our leadership? To remove the concept of "politics as career." It could work, the majority of the people who become effective leaders are those who served in office and then left the political arena but continued to work in areas of need.

Just a thought. Just a thought to distract me from the blinking lights on the printer mocking me this morning.


c.2011 Cassandra Tribe. All Rights Reserved.