Digital Analogue

Long-lived printer queue

I finally just got around to hooking up my printer. It's been sitting in a box since I packed it up to move last July—now that I again live very close to work, I'd just been printing anything I needed at work.

So I opened up the box and lifted out the printer. No cables there; I must have merged them in with the rest of my supply. So, dug out a standard power cable and a standard ethernet cable, and connected them. Then I pressed the power button, and it went through several minutes of self-testing.

When it was done, it said, "Paper out. Refill and press Start to continue." Ok, sure. Then I had to go track down my printer paper, but I found it, filled the printer, and pressed Start. I figured it was just going to print a test sheet or something.

What came out was a two-page programming problem that I had written for our Longwood programming contest back in mid-October. I stared at this for a moment. I have not thought about this problem in close to six months. I didn't even remember developing it on my home machine, although apparently I did (the files are there). So all I can think is that I absentmindedly hit Print six months ago, perhaps while trying to generate a PDF or something; and it sat in the queue since then. My computer has been rebooted several times in that interval, and assorted programs have been upgraded, but this lonely little print job has patiently waited for my printer to be reconnected, and sure enough, it was, and it jumped right to it and printed.

Now I kind of feel guilty recycling the paper. It went to such effort, you know?

"We have to stop looking at the government as 'them', and have to start reclaiming it as 'us'." --Rich Whitney