Why I blasted my printer with a shotgun

What's the worst thing about working from home? Surely it's having to use the personal printer, which is the most detestable piece of technology ever invented. 

We have the technology to print in 3D, and yet when it comes to printers in our homes, they appear to be virtually unchanged since they were first sold in 1981. We all have our tales of woe with them. I have many, too many for here, but doubtless they will be familiar to all – the unclearable paper jam; the paper jam that has been cleared but the printer maintains has not been; the insistence that the printer is not connected; the printer that takes half-a-day to warm up in order to print just one page before revealing that it is out of ink; the printer that mysteriously requires a new magenta cartridge to print a monotone document; the unexplained stripes that appear down every page which can never be got rid of; the paper tray that can never be inserted to the printer’s satisfaction... The issues are endless.

That’s why a few weeks ago in a moment of all too common printing rage, I took my Canon Pixma MP990 colour inkjet printer with built-in CCD scanner and a (supposed) print speed of twelve pages per minute and (supposed) WiFi outside and blasted it with a shotgun. And lo, it felt good. Very good. My blood pressure returned to regular levels: finally, we were free.

I wasn't going to share this, but thanks to my brand new printer f***ing up already, I now have no self-control when it comes to expressing my contempt for these detestable devices. Enjoy. pic.twitter.com/qiqm2flAIZ

— Guy Walters (@guywalters) February 12, 2021

I cannot remember the specific reason why I had to take my Canon out and shoot it. It was doubtless one such error that had enraged me, but in truth there had been a whole litany and I had finally snapped.

After the shooting, I had hoped that would be the end of having a printer in the house. Surely, I said to my wife, we no longer needed one. Documents can be easily read on cheap tablets, most forms are filled in online, and with electronic signatures being widely permitted, there really is no need to actually disgorge the contents of your screen onto some very thin slices of chemically-treated wood.

But no, for some reason that I still don’t understand, my daughter needs a printer for her schoolwork, and so, with much reluctance and googling, I invested in an HP ENVY Photo 6220 All-in-One Printer. What I hadn’t realised about buying an HP is that I pretty much had to enrol in their Instant Ink programme, which means subscribing to regular deliveries of cartridges. I duly did so, and for a week or so, my daughter was printing things without problems. But then an error message appeared, informing me that we couldn’t use a new cartridge that I had installed – a cartridge that had been delivered by HP – because the printer was not ‘enrolled in HP Instant’. But, reader, it was. And when I tried to log into my Instant Ink account, my email address – to which I get sent spam by HP – was not recognised.

I just gave up, and you should all give up your printers as well. I have come to the conclusion that printers are, essentially, God's way of telling us to stop trying to print things. Why else would they be so bad?

Despite huge technological advances in IT over the past few decades, from mobile phones to sleek laptops and everything else in between, printers remain as unspeakably bad as they were in the Eighties. 

Why have they never improved? The main reason is that they are essentially sold as loss leaders: they are priced as low as possible and are made as cheaply as possible as a consequence (hence why they always suffer mechanical issues). Printer companies make up for this lack of profit with sales of ink. This explains why cartridges are so expensive, and why they have become smaller and smaller over the years. Worse still, many printers appear to stop working if you use third party, unofficial cartridges (or, in the case of my HP, even if you use the official ones).

In short, the printer companies have all the morals of street drug pushers, reeling you in with a cheap hit, and then flogging you, the helpless addict, a substance – printer ink – which costs up to £2,000 per litre.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Let’s free ourselves from these awful companies and their evil devices. We should not need to waste hours attempting to print simple things on bits of A4 paper. The world, and you, will be better for ditching them. And now I must go and find some more cartridges. Not for the printer, you understand, but for my gun.