The Empty Soda Can

First of all, if you haven’t read the Introduction to this post, please do so. It’s not absolutely necessary, but it will help you better understand our search for the perfect printer. :-) After years and years of purchasing printer after printer—some good, some bad, some so horrible you’d prefer a poke in the eye with a sharp stick—we were finally happy with our Brother HL-4070CDW for printing, Epson CX5200 for flatbed scanning, and HP OfficeJet 4315 for sheet-feed scanning. We also had our worse-than-a-sharp-stick Samsung SPP-2020 for photos, but since that only worked once before being in the shop for three years and then coming back still broken , we hardly even counted that. But the one thing we still required was a functional CD printer. I hopped online and, lo and behold, Staples just happened to be running an awesome sale on the Epson Artisan 835. But did I want to risk another Epson all-in-one? Sure, my CX5200 was great, but it wasn’t a CD printer. The only CD-printing al...

Six years ago, Anna and I got a very nice birthday present from my grandmother: a brand new iBook (then Apple’s consumer-grade laptop). We named her Candace, and she was a great little machine. Although she did have a few minor problems, Apple was very good to take care of us whenever something went wrong. From the time the hard drive died to the letters wearing off of a few oft-used keys, they always replaced everything quickly and free of charge. Their customer service was, in a word, impeccable. Then, just over three years ago, with only a week left on our extended warranty, I brought our little Candi in for a checkup. I told the Genius on staff to look her over, see if there was anything wrong with her, and if so, fix it. (If by chance there were something wrong, I was not going to have to pay for repairs, if I could help it.) He took her into the shop, and a few days later I got a call: some part I’d never heard of, that did who knows what, was indeed broken. Unfortunately, it w...