Fun with Ink

The printer wouldn't work. This was no big surprise. Why should it be any different? It was turning out to be one of those mornings when nothing goes right.

I woke up that morning with great expectations. I was going to get a lot of things done and move on quickly to bigger and better things. I had a lot of paperwork to fill out and then I was going to make one big road trip to drop it off and finish a bunch of other errands and end up at VBS. All around, I had it planned to be an abundantly productive day . . . which was why I was so frustrated to trip up on the first step.

After checking my e-mail and finding I had a few more errands to add to my day, and also out that the paperwork I needed wouldn't download, I decided to forget that and print what I could. I have long ago learned that the important thing to do when you have a full to-do list is to not get stuck on the first step. Keep moving and come back for it later. According I pushed the print button and waited impatiently for it to kick out the papers I needed to get my busy day started. That was when I discovered that the printer was taking the day off. I hadn't seen that one coming. . . it didn't thrill my soul to realize that an obstinate printer had just been added to the growing pile of obstacles standing between myself and my nice neat list.

After pushing every button I could think of that might possible convince the printer to print, I finally decided (correctly) that it was out of ink. It was one of those frustrating chain of events where one problem leads directly to the next. However, the empty printer seemed to be the root of the problem so I decided to tackle it first. Never having filled the printer with ink, but desperately needing to print my document, I decided that now was a good time to learn. After a quick phone call to dad (who has filled the printer several times) I had the basic idea of how to do it. He said it was a simple process of filling a syringe with ink and injecting it into the cartridge, but he also warned that it could be a little tricky to know where and how to do it, and that if it wasn't done correctly it could be messy. (If you know my mom and ink, you know that when she heard this it quickly became an outside-and-old-clothes job.)

Confident that I could fill the cartridge without making a mess, I nevertheless put on a pair of old shorts, a cut-off blue shirt, latex gloves (I had already found out by grabbing the ink cartridge that ink doesn't come off the hands easily) and moved my operation outside. Lindsey was somewhat dubious about my ability to do something for the first time without an instruction manual, but she needed the printer as badly as I did so she kept most of her “helpful” comments to herself.

It wasn't hard to find where the ink was supposed to go. There was a little cap right on the top that opened directly into the cartridge. The hard part was figuring out how to get it there. If done incorrectly, an air bubble would form inside the cartridge and I had been warned that this would not create a happy situation. Not sure exactly how much ink to put in the cartridge, I guestimated one whole syringe for one empty cartridge. Filling the syringe to the top, I stuck it the mouth of the cartridge and started squirting ink into it. Everything was going smoothly as Lindsey walked out the door to see how I was making out with my little baby and its bottle.

Standing there prissily in her spotless white shorts and pink shirt, she made a comment about how funny I looked in my old clothes and latex gloves. Concentrating on my task and trying to figure out why the ink had stopped flowing into the cartridge, I pushed the syringe a little harder and responded vaguely that I wearing this get-up in case something happened and the ink decided to get creative. She raised her eyebrows and asked once more if I knew what I was doing. I was just about to assure here that I knew exactly what I was doing and that nothing was going to happen when something did. Without warning, my “baby” decided it had enough and erupted, spewing ink at an impressive range in every direction. I could feel ink dripping from my legs and neck and knew emmediately I was covered. I slowly looked up to see what the damage was. What I saw made me laugh for the first time that day.

Lindsey was standing there with a shocked look on her face and big splotches of ink all over her face and shirt. Her mouth was still open as if she had been about to say something, but nothing was coming out. At that time Greg and Josh rolled into the driveway just in time to see both of us covered in ink, something they thought was terribly funny until the walked in the inky grass and got their feet covered in it. I still wasn't sure exactly how funny this was because I knew I had a lot more on me than Lindsey had on her and I wasn't sure if it would come off, but I thought it was pretty funny, too. Fortunately, the ink did come off, at least most of it, and the printer started working, allowing me to get back to my long and very boring list of things to do. I'm not sure if Lindsey agrees yet, but I think it was the best thing that happened all that day. I learned an important lesson out of my experiment: If you're ever having a bad day and need something to make you laugh, try squirting you sister with ink!