I am in a rare mood where I am pissed off. It starts with the high school moving graduation from the high school football field to the local college football field. Last fall, the school district tried to push a vague bond measure that would have included funding to replace the 13 year old turf. Of course, they wanted something like 50 million dollars to study replacing a grade school and some other things but more of it was just not specific. It went down in a ball of flames, as it should.

Miraculously, the district found the funding for the turf and it got installed at the beginning of the year. The district now claims that the surface is not ready to be used in time for graduation. Never mind the fact that they have been sticking javelins in it all track season. Fortunately, we have a NCAA Division II university in town and they graciously agreed to host graduation for a small fee of $5000.

It gets better. Graduation at the high school was open for all. I am hearing from teachers that it is going to be restricted to eight guests. I guess that they are going to spring this on us at the last minute. But there is a cherry on top. Those grad announcements that we paid a princely sum ($3 ea,) for in the fall are printed with all the details at the high school.

The announcements were black. My wife wanted to just cross out all of the details using a Sharpie. I tried one and it looked like crap. Since we were going to print inserts anyway for the graduation party details, I suggested that we print labels instead and cover the erroneous text. I took careful measurements to see what label available would be the perfect fit. I found one that was available at a local office supply store.

Time to print up some samples. I wanted the right font, the right words and it had to fit in the label space. I have done some label printing over the years. I used to run a lab where we would print shipping labels daily so I am aware of some of the finicky-ness of the process. I printed some samples on paper and life was fine.

Printing seems to be a constant problem in this house. Not with me but everyone else. Most of it has to do with being on the wrong network. You have to be on the same network as the printer to print. My wife who keeps her phone on the IOT network so that she can fiddle with the robot vacuum daily claims that she has lost the ability to print. No, you have to have your phone the right network. As a result, she e-mails me stuff to print all the time.

If it is not being on the wrong network, then the ink cartridges get crusted up. This means that the quality of print is poor. I have taken to buying generic cartridges mostly because they just do not remain viable and they cost so much relative to how much we actually print.

As soon as those elements are figured out, then somebody used all the paper. I have a smaller personal printer in the basement because my wife doesn’t want me or the kids randomly printing while she is working. But, it only holds twenty sheets of paper. Since we do so little printing, it is no big deal but the majority of the printing occurs on the smaller printer.

A new phenomenon has developed. For some reason, I have to reboot the computer each time I print because the spooler software gets stuck. I am more than sure it is a driver problem because this computer and printer have been paired for more than ten years and I never had this problem before. It has taken me several evenings to troubleshoot and figure this out.

I originally set this computer up as a user computer. So, my profile is not an administrator and I cannot reboot the print spooler. I have to log out and do those tasks as an administrator which is another pain in the butt. It makes me pan for the days that had the LPT1 connection.

Our first printer was a dot-matrix printer. We had to buy the paper from a computer store. A giant box pretty much lasted the life of the computer. Color is cool, print quality is much better, it is significantly faster than the old printer and we didn’t have phones that needed to print. But, I will tell you that it always printed.

End our Programming Routine: What has me stewing is that I am irritated at the school district and so anything that prolongs this process of getting these invitations completed just keeps rekindling my ire. When I get frustrated, sometimes I do a salty internet search to see what others are saying. I found lots of relatively recent forums commiserating my problems. It really does no good at all other than I feel better. I am going to give HP/Microsoft the benefit that they will get the driver situation figured out with time. Fortunately, we don’t print very much.