Printing…the furry way

Well, I'm still poorly with my chest infection (something to do with me being chopped in half and having my lung collapsed apparently), but not so poorly that I can't blog a bit and let you know what's going on in my world. So here goes....

My cat is fascinated by the printer. It has a drop down front which automatically activates when you press the print button and he loves the way that the paper slides in the back and then gets spat out the front. He is so intrigued by it all, that he has spent all 3 years of his life trying to figure out what goes on inside this strange box that sits on the desk. In fact, he is so mystified by it that just the sound of the print head moving into position, or the noise the front makes when it drops (which is almost none by the way), is enough to bring him rushing from whatever part of the house he was making mischief in…He has over the years tried peering in through the back, peering in through the front, fishing with his paw in the paper feed tray, the same in the output tray and even trying to get his head stuck right inside the little slot in the front that the paper comes out of. All to no avail, he still hasn’t managed to work out that it’s just a printer…

The other day he excelled himself…

In a frenzy to figure out what was happening inside he shoved his whole arm (and most of his shoulder) up inside the printer from the front – there was a loud grinding noise, then a bang and then more grinding noises and sounds of paper being tortured. The cat just stayed there, fishing around inside as if nothing untoward was happening until I grabbed him and tossed him off the desk. The printer had by this time stopped (unsurprisingly), the red error light was flashing furiously and the little screen had a message on it:

“Warning” it said “Foreign object in print head”….then helpfully “Remove object and press OK”!

Well, I had already removed the cat (bet they never expected that in the factory they built the printer in) and so I pressed OK. It gave me another message:

“Please wait for a bit” …. No, seriously, that is exactly what it said – just that, in plain English. Anyway, so I did, waited – even though I wasn’t exactly certain how long ‘a bit’ was. Anyway, about a minute passed and the printer carried on as if nothing had happened. Of course the page came out with no black anywhere apart from the paw prints on the crumpled up bits but in the end that turned out to be caused by the cartridge floating loosely around inside the box having been displaced by the aforementioned foreign object. Put the cartridge back in and hey presto(!) Canon got themselves their biggest fan….

…well, wouldn’t you be if, after all that your printer still worked?