Another One Bites The Dust

I'm pretty sure this apartment is cursed. I just cannot seem to do anything right here.

No, this time it wasn't an apartment-specific thing, but I'm gonna blame it anyway because this place has bad chi or karma or something. Today, it was about finally installing the printer that my mom got me for Christmas.

Yes, I understand that it has been a ridiculously long period of time that I have had this printer and not installed it. Part of me was waiting for the ink in my old printer to run out (which it just did recently) but I believe part of me knew something bad was going to happen when I tried to install this stupid thing and therefore was avoiding it.

So I'm following the directions, I'm fairly good at figuring things out intuitively, but somehow I did a misstep and it all went to hell. The directions tell you to plug in the USB cable but then not to plug it in. What I mean by that is it tells you to plug it into the printer but not into the computer. Now why tell me to plug in the USB cable but not fully plug it in - that's just stupid. Just tell me to plug it in later (like 4 steps later) when I actually need to do it. Okay, so I accidentally plugged it into my computer. Does that give the printer the right to never work? Sorry, gonna have to return this one - I plugged in the USB cable too soon!!

Well, I'm sure that wasn't really the problem. I disconnected everything, tried turning things on and off, unplugged things, and even turned my computer off and back on. The whole problem was something with the print cartridges but they were brand new (came with the printer) and I had installed them correctly.

I went ahead and loaded the software thinking perhaps I could just get the printer to "install new cartridges" as if this wasn't the first time I was doing it. After I installed, it said to test a print page. I went ahead and tried and it located one of the six cartridges as being the problem cartridge. Okay, let's take a look at that one...full of ink, inserted correctly, nothing looks damaged on the cartridge or in the printer...but it doesn't work.

At this point I feel like a caveman beating two rocks together because I am so mad that the printer cannot identify the cartridge that is obviously in there correctly and isn't damaged. I start yelling and cursing at the thing because all I wanted to do was set it up today. Why does it have to give me grief? Why does it have to be so hard?? Yaarrrghhh!!

I don't really want to go buy another ink cartridge because the one I have is perfectly fine. I also don't think this printer really sells the cartridges one at a time, but I'm only guessing about that. I can't call Customer Service because they're not open. I can't print anything until I get this fixed but that's not really how life works...well, I can always hook up my old printer. I can't just drop everything this week to call the Customer Service, which I'm sure will ask me something stupid like "did you install the cartridge correctly?" but I'll have to do it - I'll have to sit on the phone with them (mind you, I'll need to be at home to make this call) to see if they can figure out why I'm having issues. It just makes me so infuriatingly mad to not be able to get this to work. And it's a huge "I told you so" because I should have installed it months ago to make sure it worked because now I'm pretty sure I won't be able to return it. Also, if I do have to return it it means lugging it to Austin.

See, cursed. I can't do anything right. I was so on a roll this weekend too because I cleaned up my apartment (still need to vacuum but I was super proud of all I got done) and was feeling like I could get a lot of things squared away - the printer being one of them. I'm not terrible with technology but something seemingly so simple did not work for me. Cursed. I will be so glad when I finally get to move out of this dump and hopefully leave the bad karma behind. I need things to start going right again so that I don't always get my motivation squashed.

Now this beautiful printer just sits on my desk with nothing to do.