Idiot Printing

Last night I thought I’d print out some pictures for my office walls. I’ve just switched back to using my venerable HP inkjet as I think it prints better colours than the Canon one I got last year. And 7dayshop were doing a good deal on proper ink cartridges for it. So off I went. Of course, I’d forgotten how horrid HP printer drivers are, and coupled with the “quirkiness” of Photoshop Elements (I’m being very generous here) I had a much rougher time than I expected.

I discovered that if you are daft/clever enough to try and print with the preview enabled in the printer driver (which is one way I try to avoid wasting a quid's worth of paper and ink) the driver just hangs up, with no way of clearing the print job. You have to delete the printer and make a new one. Of course I didn’t find this out straight away, I had to waste half an hour doing reboots and trying lots of other things before I finally managed to get the thing to work.

And the printing looked horrid. There were awful smears showing through on the page. I stared (and this is true) at the page coming out of the printer for at least 30 seconds before it dawned on me what I’d done. I’d put an already printed page through the printer. I’d used some enormously expensive amount of ink ruining a perfectly good picture, which I’d popped into the paper box to stop it from getting creased.

Idiot.