Half My Kingdom for a Dyson Printer

Yesterday, the fiery chariot from "The Mummy" that comes to suck your soul out of you took me for a ride through Dante's seven or nine or however many rings of Hades and there was a baby crying in the front seat while country music blared.

That's what a migraine feels like.

So my chum called because I wasn't at work and she and another chum had stopped by to delight me by having lunch with me only I wasn't there because I was on about level five of Hades between "Some Beach" and "Boot Scootin' Boogie," and the hands of the damned were curling around my ankles trying to pull me in, like that scene from "What Dreams May Come." Or maybe I'm thinking of "The Mummy" again.

Here's the probl-ay-mo: I never remember to get migraine medicine from the doctor because they only come once every few months. But then, one comes, and I'm off to Dante's Inferno.

So I called chum Emily to see why she had called, after sleeping off levels four, five and six of Hades in the afternoon.

She had a printer story.

Now, I confess: I. Hate. Printers. Of all office supplies everywhere, printers evoke deep levels of rage that I'm ashamed to admit I even harbor. Spikes of violence come shooting through my blood pressure, and I long for baseball bats, bulldozers, and large plate glass windows through which to heave errant printers.

I didn't used to have such a gut reaction. Then I worked in the office of a car dealership, where one printer was shared by quite a few users. If a slight breeze eased through an open door, it wouldn't work right. If more than one job was sent at the same time, it didn't work right. If a kangaroo in the outback sneezed on a full moon, it didn't work. It was after spending time fantasizing about throwing it through the showroom windows that I saw "Office Space" for the first time. Then I knew.

I knew I wasn't alone.

Back to Emily's new office printer. Her office purchased a new printer, and sprang for an extra hundred bucks, because this would bump them up to the next level of printer: one with memory and a double-sided printing feature.

Want to know what the double-sided printing feature was?

Well, do you?

You know already, don't you?

It was instructions - instructions - on how to re-feed the paper back into the printer to copy on the other side. You know, the way you do when you don't have a DOUBLE-SIDED PRINTING FEATURE.

Now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I propose that printers need drastically retooled. Now. They are the bane of my computer-user existence.

And then I think of Dyson: those lovely commercials with the calm British man explaining that vacuum design has remained largely unchanged for decades, with one terrible flaw: the longer you use the vacuum, the more suction is reduced because of the bag filling. So he and his team of engineers addressed the problem by totally revamping the idea of how vacuum cleaners work. Result? Wind-tunnel Dyson vacuums. He completely re-approached the situation and revolutionized Vacuuming As We Know It.

Half my kingdom for a Dyson Printer!