Every end is a new beginning.
— Captain Cloud
So my old printer finally bit the dust. It was an HP PSC2175, a combination color printer/scanner/copier that I got in probably 2000. It was pretty snazzy for its time, and even until it finally broke it was extremely useful. (The only technology it really lacked was Wi-Fi, though it did have a bunch of weird, semi-proprietary camera memory chip ports, and a USB connection that made Linux-early-adopter me learn a few things.)
The printer started having trouble a few months ago, then finally went belly-up in early June: whenever it was turned on it would just start making sounds like a ratchet or gear was slipping. The Internet told me that this was because some internal parts needed cleaning, but neither I nor any repair place I called would do it. So, I started looking for a replacement.
I finally replaced it last week, with a Brother MFC J1010DW, essentially the same printer/scanner/copier I had before, except it now also has Wi-Fi connectivity (and it’s not Hewlet-Packard, my only other criterion).
I’m surprised that I feel a little down about getting rid of the old printer. It really owed me nothing at this point, but I had it for so long and it had been a reliable workhorse all that time, I feel like a part of my life has slipped away. It’s still up on the desk for now though, I can look at it any time I want until I finally recycle it.
By the way, this is what I was writing twenty years ago, and this is what I was writing fifteen years ago.
