I know I don’t blog often enough, but I have been fairly busy for the last 6 months having gotten a job, moved to Preston, etc… Anyway, so I have recently joined the Preston freecycle list – it was to get rid of 2 TV’s, an ink jet Printer and some other stuff I didn’t need any more. However I hadn’t reckoned on what people might offer on there, although most of it is clothes and furniture, one guy advertised a large colour laser printer – a QMS Magicolor 2 Desk Laser…
If you think this will fit on your desk, you’d be mistaken, it is huge and probably about 10 years old. Getting it home proved to be a problem when we realised it wasn’t in Preston, but in Garstang (half way to Lancaster), but Garstang has a PR3 postcode!
Tuesday evening I started to play with it, I plugged it in and immediately it told me there was some kind of jam, then it told me that something else was wrong, when I finally got it to the point where I thought everything was OK, it said “Call Service F5 Charge HV”, I figured that HV is High Voltage and that this had something to do with the fuser – the bit of a laser printer that heats up the dust like toner to make it stick to the page. But the fuser doesn’t seem to be a part you can take out easily. I undid one screw then another, pretty soon it was just a massive collection of plastic, metal and circuit boards on my floor….
It went from this:
(Admittedly I stole this photo from the Interwebs because I forgot to take a before shot!)
To this:
At which point I decided I couldn’t be arsed if I could get it to work or not, I probably couldn’t get it back to being one piece again!
When I was a kid my Aunt brought me this book called “Miles and the Screwdriver”, Miles got a screwdriver for his birthday and then started to undo all the screws he could find… until he nearly undid the world… at this point “God” was angry with him… yeah, so that is quite believable, right?! But I guess I am kinda like Miles, I just can’t stop undoing those screws; It could be a metaphor for my life really!
I think my Jawa days are behind me, either that or stuff just isn’t as fixable as it once was!
on a side note, you really should blog more, you’re a good writer.
You really pulled off the conversational writing style well, which imho, is one of the best ways to write if you can do it, you explained bits like what the error message was in a way that normal people could understand, used really descriptive imagery, plus a bunch of other stuff I can’t really tell, but get the feeling its there.
besides, you’re still posting more often than dan, so you get at least some points for that 😉 hint hint dan!
So maybe I missed my calling and I should have journalism and perhaps been a technical writer or something? I dunno… I guess I write good and I have written some super documentation for work, but it doesn’t exactly flow well, takes me ages to get going, etc… Anyway, thanks for the heads up!
I have been there. I enjoy a good taking apart of some gadget. Who knows, some of that stuff may come in handy, or not.
So did you manage to put it back together again? 😉
(+1 on Ed’s comment, by the way, especially now you’re not in Plymouth.)