The printers can sense fear…

Dear PawPrint,

What did I ever do to you to deserve this treatment? I feel like I don’t ask you for too much. All I want is to print my reading for class. That’s all I ever want. Yes, sometimes this is hundreds of pages, but as a printer at a university, that is your job, right?

My battle with you goes back to the very beginning of my time here at Columbia. We’ve all been there. It is 11 or something the night before your LitHum class, and you are trying to convince yourself that you can actually get through all 250 pages of reading before the seminar. With immense hubris, you upload the files given by your professor. You trek down to the John Jay lobby to print, but upon tapping your ID, you are met with only silence. You then go back up the evil John Jay elevators to get your laptop (rookie mistake), as of course, you did not resize the files. You try to print again, just to be met with more silence. You tap on the neighboring printer, which begins to make noise. You have used this same printer recently, but of course, now it decides to take 30 seconds for each page. Of course. You, PawPrint, have never had to experience this humiliation, but it is one every Columbia student (at least those who know how to read) is familiar with.

Is it true that you can sense fear? I thought that by now, my third year here, we would have a better relationship. I tried getting the PawPrint driver, which helps in some ways, as I don’t need to resize the PDFs, but it hurts in others. I have tried uploading every document to Adobe Acrobat and printing from there. This works sometimes, but other times the printer just decides it doesn’t want to. Oh, how cruel you are. I hope to understand you better and rebuild our relationship this year, but I fear this is too much to ask of you.

With apprehension,

Maggie Aufmuth

Image via Bwog Archives