Brian Lawler

Anxiety sensors in the keyboard?
November 25, 2007

I spent a good part of last Sunday trying to print a single 5 x 7 inch ink-jet print of singers on a stage. My printer is too big for this task (43 inches wide), so I ganged a few other photos on the same page, and started the machine printing. There was a short deadline, of course.

I dutifully set the page size to 7 x 43 inches, and set the ICC profile, rendering intent and resolution settings, and hit the PRINT button. And, no matter how many times I tried, it printed a cropped version of the page – 8.5 x 11 inches in size, leaving the paper blank from the 11 inch mark to the end. I checked my settings and printed again... same results. I installed new print drivers from Epson, and then I tried again... same result. I spent a couple of hours and at least $25 in wasted paper to get one usable print. It was infuriating.

The Epson printer pull-down menu on the left is missing a number of paper choices that are present in the menu on the right. The difference? The paper choices returned after I took a three-day break for Thanksgiving, threw away my printer settings, made new printer settings and tried again.

I navigated to the Epson FAQ page for my printer to look for a fix. In every pertinent category of Frequently-Asked-Questions, the site referred back to itself, and recommended that I download the latest drivers and install them. I had just done this, so I didn’t do it again.

I shut the printer off and took a Thanksgiving break. On my return, I fired it up again, added some new ink, and received an error message advising me to throw the printer software settings away and create new using the Macintosh Printer Setup Utility. Once I did this, all of my troubles vanished. The printer works perfectly again, and now I have the correct settings for papers and resolution (some of them had disappeared from the earlier version), and it gives me hope that life with the printer will continue. I give thanks for the new settings.

I am not one to suggest that software has a conscience, or that it will occasionally “get even” with its operator. But, sometimes, once in a while, on the eve of a very important deadline – my software really seems to be able to sense my anxiety and then amplify it. On one occasion, thirty minutes before a FedEx deadline, the Collect for Output menu item in my copy of QuarkXPress vanished. Really. I calculated that it would take me about ten minutes to quit Quark, restart it, and reload the (very large) job I was working on. In that ten minutes I would miss the FedEx truck, so I just shut the computer down and went to dinner.

When I returned a few hours later, the menu item had returned, and I collected my job without difficulty. I paid extra for a Saturday pick-up, and the job arrived on time. And, I was able to tell this story about software-gone-mad. It’s a crazy world, and sometimes things happen that I cannot explain.

Posted by Brian Lawler on November 25, 2007 | Comments (5)