I spuddle.

It’s my birthday on Friday.   I’m going to be 39.   I tell you this to save you from looking up somewhere else how old I am or trying to guess based on my picture.    Everyone who has guessed (And why WOULD you guess my age?  Seriously?  I will tell you if you want to know.  In fact, I just did.) has guessed that I’m going to be 40, which means that I spent too much time in the sun as a kid or maybe all the hard-living I do is starting to show on my lined, sagging face.   Speaking of which, I’m going to dye my hair RIGHT NOW with drugstore dye, thus causing my hairdresser to vomit onto my lap.   (That’s a quote.   He promised he would if I used a Clairol product.)  But you can’t please all the people all the time.

To make a long story short, my mum and dad bought me a Canon Pixma MP620 for my birthday because I asked them to and even went to the shop with them and selected it and carried it to my car (which in itself was no small feat because carrying a printer plus managing two small tempermental beasts children in one of those stores where you have to pay for a shopping cart and you don’t have a quarter is, well, difficult.   To say the least.   I could say more, but I won’t because this is a quick post.   I have to have a shower while Mickey Mouse Club House is still on, so no time for small talk.

I brought the printer home and left it in the front hall for several days, which everyone knows is the first step to connecting any networked printer.    Buying the printer coincided nicely with my tax deadline and I needed to hook it up in order to print the spreadsheets which I haven’t done yet because why do them when you don’t have a printer to print them on?   Exactly.   Yesterday, being the last possible minute to do this, I decided to hook up the printer.   I assumed — because I am an idiot — that it would be easy because it’s a Mac and MACS JUST WORK and Mac recommends Canon printers so together they also must JUST WORK, except for the part where they don’t bloody well work together at all, do they?  The joke is on you.   Except, in this case, “you” means “me”.

The first step in setting up your new Canon Wireless nightmare is to remove 5000 pieces of orange tape that are applied on every single bit of surface inside and out of the machine to prevent movement during shipping.   I can only assume that the printers are shipped on refurbished Concord jets and simply dropped from near the atmosphere onto the shops which are to sell them.   There is no other explanation for the amount of movement that the Canon factory obviously expects the printer to have to endure on its voyage.    Or maybe motors are attached to the printers and they have to make the ocean crossing alone with only a single printer cartridge and a fishing line for survival.   Or maybe they feed the printers to whales and then have the whales vomit them up on North American shores.   That would explain a lot about why the whale population is shrinking, come to think of it.   I don’t know.   I only know that it’s a lot of tape.   And why does it need to be bright orange?  Is the printer expecting to have to redirect traffic?   At night?   It’s a mystery, people, and one that I’m not going to solve.

After twenty minutes of tape and plastic removal, the printer looked like a printer should.   I cleaned a little space on the kitchen counter which was formerly used to store a stereo with too-short a cord to reach the plug, which has been there since we moved in.   Everything was going so well.    Then I got to the part where I had to put the computer on the network.   All I can say is, “What the PLUCK?”   Except I didn’t use the word “pluck” in that sentence, I used a different word that rhymes with pluck but is not suitable for younger viewers or right-wing Christian fundamentalists.

Here’s what I did.  I put the disc (labelled DISC FOR MACS) into my MacBook.   So far so good.   I followed the vague instructions which included various different loops where you hit “cancel” when what you want is to “install” and you then answer the same question 42 different times, only to loop around to the question again before you get frustrated and stuff your entire MacBook into the garbage disposal while screaming “SERENITY NOW, PLUCKERS!”  I didn’t do that, but I wanted to.   Instead, I took the kids to the beach and let them play in the ocean in their clothes.   It was therapeutic.   Want to see?

I did not write the word Love in the sand. I actually didn't even see it until I was looking at the pictures later. Neat, don't you think?

Then we went home and I went back to setting up the printer by repeating all the things I’d done before, installing the same stuff that I’d already installed hoping for a different result, which I think is actually the definition of insanity.    Then I did it again, for good measure.   By the time Clayton came home from work, I was slumped in front of the TV with the kids, drinking wine.   Me, not them.   I’m pretty easy-going as a parent but I draw the line at wine.   Well, in combination with TV anyway.   It’s one or the other, kids.   You have to choose.

Clayton saw that I was in a fragile mental state.   He’s good at sensing these things.   Probably the foaming at the mouth and eye-rolling helped to drive the point home.   He made dinner and then escaped outside to mow the lawn.      I put the kids to bed by telling them stories about how MUMMY HATES CANON PRINTERS and MACS DON’T JUST WORK, DO THEY?    They like that kind of thing, especially when the story ends with the Bad Macs going to jail and being eaten by fire-breathing dragons.

At 10:00 pm, I came downstairs to install the drivers again because if at first you don’t succeed, you should totally do the same thing over and over again until you go insane.    Then Clayton took over because he really hates to relax in front of a movie at the end of the day, he prefers to undertake impossibly frustrating tasks which have already been performed multiple times to no avail.    Then we gave up and went to bed.   We both cried ourselves to sleep and had bad dreams about the Error 300 code we had seen 4,560 times in the last hour.

In the morning, I had the idea that maybe if I hooked the printer up with the PC that I never use, it would be easier.   And guess what?  It was.   It took five minutes and it worked swimmingly.   From the PC.   That I never use.    So then I thought it would be “fun” (if by “fun”, I mean “suicidally depressing”) to network the Mac on now that the printer itself was working.   It wasn’t fun.   I won’t bore you with the details, but I will bore you with the solution.   Ready?   Here it is:

Step 1:   Click the little Apple thing on the top left of your screen.

Step 2:   Click preferences.

Step 3:   Look for the preference that says, “I prefer PCs because the DO just work.”

Step 4:    Click the printers/faxes icon while making angry hissing noises between your teeth and shouting at your kids that breakfast has to wait for at least ten more minutes.

Step 5:   Click the little plus sign to add a printer even though the printer you want to use is already selected on the list.

Step 6:  Click something else and then something else, because at this point you are just randomly clicking for the sake of forward movement.

Step 7:   Find hidden somewhere a little drop down that says “Canon Wireless Printers”   and you will see two Canon Wireless Printers on the list, one which says “Canon WP620″ and one which has a bunch of gobbledygook after the words Canon WP620.    Add that one.   Delete the other one.

Step 8:   Exhale. You are done.

I’m not sure why somewhere in the 200 page manual no one mentions that when you install a Canon printer on a Mac, the one that populates itself into all your printer settings is actually a phantom printer that does not exist and that you must unearth the other one with the same sorts of skills used by archaeologists when they dig up the bones of a pterosaur in the tundra, but maybe that just didn’t translate well into English.   There.  I said it.   It’s what my dad says every time he is forced to read any kind of manual, “GUESS IT DOESN’T TRANSLATE WELL INTO ENGLISH.”   I have officially become my dad.

And I’m only 38!   At least for a few more days.

Filed under: MacBook, Shopping