Cats and Dogs

I tweeted earlier about my wife’s ability to make printers cease to work, and it has nothing to do with her computer skills. It’s just the old cliche of machines deciding to operate based on their perception of your needs. Cars are dogs; at their worst, they’ll try. Printers and copiers are cats. I bought her a printer last year, but it refused to work with her Mac mini. Finally I swapped my old printer for hers, installed the drivers – a whopping half-gig of HP garbage spat all over the disk, with constant requests to install a module that would allow me to participate in a survey. There are times when YES and NO are not sufficient options, when HELL NO is what you really want to click. . . .

The only way BP could be more hated: if they changed their name to HP and were spilling printer ink into the Gulf. At the current price that would be about a billion dollars an hour, probably.

- Lileks