#88: Phone-up tone-up

I try pretty hard never to print anything onto paper. You can’t do a keyword search on your filing cabinet; the whole paper thing is so last-century. As for the much touted roll-up, electronic plastic paper, I don’t buy it -at least not ’til it’s as cheap as the ordinary, pulpy cellulose stuff (It had also better be biodegradable or we’ll be up to our armpits in digital chip papers).

Anyway, when I’m forced to liaise with the outside world by means of ‘printing things out,’ the toner cartridge in my never-say-die HP printer usually requires to be extracted, hammered and intricately reinserted within the bowels of the machine. This seems to have the desired effect of redistributing the toner particles more evenly.

toner179.jpg

Today’s invention is a device which can be bolted onto each new toner cartridge, in the form of a dirt-cheap mobile phone (where would I be without these devices?). When my computer decides that’s it’s going to print something, it automatically makes a call to the phone (in silent, vibrate mode), which gives the toner enough of a jolt to make the resulting document legible.

This will then allow me to spend a happy hour or two, wrestling to remove the fragments of the document from the jaws of the disgruntled printer. Which is probably why laser printers cost as much as they do.

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