Print Damn It!

As a graphic designer, one of the most important stuff in my life is a printer. Others use printers for their documents while in my profession, I use the printer to have my designs printed in an easy to hold printed form for presentation or as the actual output. Before I see my printer and give it an elbow drop because this article is giving me nightmarish flashbacks of printers being dicks, here are some of my Saturday night ramblings about ink vomiting hardware.

Heavy software
Printers in my opinion, is not be a burden to the user. Simply plug, install a few megabytes of drivers to make it acquainted with your computer and use it. Modern printers in the other hand, requires you to install heavy software around at least 100MB to make them work, wherein the installed software you are going to use  is the driver itself and forget the other software. Most of the time the bundled software is already outdated and the company being dick, requires you to download a heavier software via the Internet before you can use it.

Ink Color Incomplete? No Print!
Some of the modern printers are douchebags. They refuse to work with you if the color cartridge is empty even if you want to use black ink for black and white printing, like word documents.  On 4 ink based (CMYK – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black/Key) printers, they will slap in your face by not working with you unless if the 4 inks are complete, even if you are only using one color that is full.

Ink Cartridges are insanely expensive
Inks are excessively too much for your budget and it is imperative to sell your organs or your soul just to buy a fresh one. It is a burden to have a chunk of percentage on your earnings just to get a new cartridge. Some say you may use the draft settings for print, but in my profession, 80% of time the settings is in either normal or best options. More usage of ink means less usage of your cash to your needs.

Paper destroyer
A lot of printers are hungry for expensive papers like photo and matte variations. They will eat your paper by jamming in their mouths and chew them vigorously to the point you can only reuse it as a scratch paper or as a crumpled imaginary basketball and tossed it in a trash can while screaming “I am the best basketball player bitch!!”.

Refuse to print on inappropriate times
Don’t you just love to throw your printer through the window when it dicks around and refuses to work properly on times you desperately need for a print out. You tried everything except hitting it with a kitchen sink yet the printer still doesn’t want to print. Later, in an unexplainable reason, the printer acts normal and lets you print wherein you have less than 5 minutes before hitting the deadline.

Just like every computer peripheral in existence, printers are assholes and provides unnecessary headaches. The ink cartridges are also need be cheaper and very accessible to common consumers because logically, without an ink, you can’t use a printer, unless your printer has a built-in ink factory inside and disperse Ice cold tea. Now print, damn it!

The Business District Streets List of Randomness

I usually parked the car at the other side of the business district because for one, its only 60 pesos for the whole day and I can trust the car to those parking boys. My office is located at the other side of the business district means I have to walk a good 10-15 minutes to my office. Along the way there are a lot of  things I observed while trekking 2 areas before reaching the door of my office. Here are the business district streets list of randomness.

Foreigners Fast Walkers
I always noticed they walk unusually faster, like they need to run and find a toilet immediately. It’s like brisk walking but a little faster. I had foreigner bosses before and they walk in a faster phase as well, even if they are only going to walk to Starbucks which is only a building away. Even the ones who are just going to a nearby convenience store they walk faster as if they are avoiding someone attempting to stick a finger up their rears.

Fresh Grads Congrats
I can sense that they are  fresh graduates who just got their first job. We all know we are happy when we first hear the words “You are hired” by the HR personnel and we can see the road to our final victory, which is your dream life, starts sparkling all over you. You can see them usually in packs, looking in their best clothes and they talk really loud, like a microphone stuck in their throats, they even surpassed the noise of buses nearby. They greatly reminds me of set of freshmens back in college that will stand in the middle of hallway after class, chatting with words “dude” and “awesome” placed in between.

Coffee Shop Door Stop
I am attempting to write a witty description and  come up a fitting rhyme for the word coffee shop. I think a door stop perfectly fits to this observation. They are people just sitting outside of a coffee shop, probably waiting for something, killing time or plain “look at me, I am in a classy coffee shop that means I am classy” without ordering anything, a step in social-climbing. Like a door stopper,  they are just there, staring in the menu or to the people who passes by.

Rider sound blaster
Blasting their music to the point you can’t hear anything in the road except with that sound, except they are scooters, not suped-up cars. I strangely find them a lot in the business district especially around night, but they are not blasting music via a car but instead through a Vespa or locally known as scooter. The scooter riders will pass you by and have their music emanating throughout the streets, ranging from annoying novelty songs to the bass oriented music of hip hop.

Odd Ones Shenanigans
Everyday you will come across different set of people, minding their business and walking hurriedly hoping to reached the allowable morning grace period. Among them, you will have a high chance of seeing instances and people of pure randomness. For many years walking around the business district I saw a lot of them like:

• A sad looking clown
• Naked crazy woman blabbering about something
• Bunch of fishball vendors accelerating their carts like crazy to avoid “anti-food pushcart guys”
• Couple of foreigners brawling over a local exotic looking female
• Deranged woman peeing beside a convenience store
• Fast food mascot standing beside of a street, looking bored, probably waiting for his ride

Traveling on foot, of course in not crime infested place, can be entertaining since a lot of random things will just pop up just like that. It’s like one of those blog idea generators, something new will surface every single day. But damn it, the parking fee should be cheaper around in my office area so I can park the car over there and not cross a couple of big business districts. They should just ditch the “45 pesos for first 2 hours, and 10 pesos per additional hour” craptacular rule. Just give us a decent parking price and adequate space and everything will be alright, hopefully.