Gryff broke my printer last night. He tried to jump up on my lap, discovered there wasn’t enough room between my legs and the keyboard tray, and fell off onto the printer (which was printing up a large document). It promptly went CLUNK and whirred a bit, then stopped and began displaying a carriage jam error. Forty-five minutes of poking and reseating and turnign it off and on and unplugging cables and troubleshooting and trying all sorts of solutions found via the Internet, HRH and I have declared it Officially Dead. I was livid.

Like I need another expense right now. Well, it can wait until all those Cheques In The Mail come to roost in the mailbox sometime in late July.

While seeking solutions on-line, I discovered a whole slew of people who have encountered the same error message and who have not been able to fix it, or get HP to solve the problem. Great. This is something I never discovered when I did my obsessive research before buying the printer. I mean sure, I encountered the occasional negative review citing problems, but the majority of them were okay and even positive.

On the bright side, I recently received a letter from the Aide financière aux études for Quebec informing me that I might be one of those who could benefit from a recent class action ruling concerning student loans obtained in 1997-98, and sure enough, when I logged into the website yesterday I discovered that I, like many others from that particular time period, had overpaid interest on the loan and was eligible for a refund. So I initiated the process and I’ll be getting a refund of just under two hundred dollars in mid-July. I always feel a grim satisfaction when a government has to send me money, instead of me having to write them a cheque or being told that oops, sorry, those taxes we accepted way back then have been recalculated and you owe us a bunch of money plus interest even though neither you nor we knew, ha ha ha.

And in completely unrelated news, I am devouring Marie Brennan’s Midnight Never Come.

LATER: Huh. I realised that part of what I wanted to do today was print out reference photos for the YA music book, and in a fit of pique tried turning the printer on. It’s working again. Of course, it randomly spews out pages of dots and dashes now and again when I haven’t sent anything to be printed, but it’s printing. I think a night on its own to consider the error of its ways plus me waxing grr about it in a journal entry may have spurred it to attempt cooperation.

EVEN LATER: Nope, dead. Oh well.

LATER STILL: Okay, this is stupid. Maybe if I drop it from about shoulder height it will decide if it will work continually or be conclusively dead. Because this sometimes-yes-sometimes-no is making me very, very cranky.