A Life With Printers

A life with printers ©

By Michael Casey

Our Kodak home printer died today, so I’ve left it outside in the street for street burial, this is like sky burial but the scrap guy comes for it, and not an eagle.  The Kodak really worked hard, though it was a bit noisy. The amount of pages per ribbon, or should I say cartridge was really good. That’s why I bought it in the first place. I had used it to print all my handouts when I was teaching Esol English.

We upgraded to Windows 10 on launch day, a couple of weeks ago, so I had to play with my Kodak software, to make sure everything was ok. It was, but then the Kodak decided to die. I had tried to explain to my teenage daughter how you problem solve printer  problems. Her idea is to replace the ribbons immediately with new ones. This is great if you have lots of money, even though Kodak cartridges are not too expensive. I was trying to teach her what I learnt in computer rooms back in 1978 onwards.

Finally in the end we had to give up the ghost, we could not fix the old Kodak, so it went into the street for sky burial, or street burial. I should add that I call printer cartridges ribbons because in the old day that was what printers used. It was more like a scroll with ink on it.

My first memory was standing in between two barrel printers which had scroll ribbons, I had to try and stack standard continuous special paper. We were printing research forms for contraceptives, our main work was market research into alcohol sales, but we also covered contraceptives. And as people were covering each other and using contraceptives, we did the market research for that too.

I also remember Al saying that Alcopops would not catch on, this was literally when they first appeared on the market. I was scared of Al he was the same build as a troll with matching moustache. In reality he was a very kind man, though I was always scared of him.

I spent years stacking paper in a noisy computer room, we were in the same room as the printers and their dust. Years later we had a separate print room built, we also had self-stacking printers. This was a big big deal, we were very impressed. With all these volumes of paper the morning team in CAD as it was called were more like CID, working out which paper matched which run sheet.

After 21 years with ACNielsen as we had become I went and worked the graveyard shift for city hall in Oldbury, the story was we were built on a former graveyard. I worked till 2.30 and then I went home. I printed the payslips for the council workforce, including my own. The toner was like an artillery shell I seem to remember. It was very old kit that had been bought 2^nd hand. The print room was new as big as a school gym.

Let’s say my time there was eventful, I even got married while I was there. I walked down the street at about 3am and got a taxi home every night. So by the time I went to bed it was 4am. Though one good thing did result, we conceived our first daughter, fertility rates must be high in the wee small hours.

My taxi driver died of alcoholism as well, and we both could have died as we were nearly totalled by a huge lorry delivering to the supermarkets in the wee small hours. It’s all very strange in the predawn hours, I should add I have done over 14 years of night shifts.

I was offered a 2^nd one year contract, but I decided not to, as my daughter was due and I wanted a normal life, no more night shifts. So I ended up working for a 4 star deluxe business hotel, CPNEC, no printers involved but plenty of carrying.  My chest size went up two inches and my neck size went up one inch, and as the hotel food was so good my belly went up 2 inches too. It was the best 3 years of my life.

I did get back to printers when I ended up as a life insurance underwriter non-medical, this involved printing loads of forms and posting them out to potential clients. What diseases do you have, what dangerous sports do you enjoy, if enjoy is the correct word. Which recreational drugs do you use, and so on. I hated this job as I was sat down all day in front of a PC apart from when I printed a very intrusive questionnaire. At the hotel I was walking around all day, maybe 5miles every day, just to get to the train station was 2 miles every day, 1 mile each way.

I promised myself I would leave that job once we came back from our Florida holiday to meet my wife’s uncle, the patriarch of the family. So I came back and left. The job was not for me, it was not for many people as the staff turnover was very high and they had 5 trainers constantly training.

I ended up at a law firm, they were a great company to work for, I was in the print room, back with my printers again. These were industrial size photo copier. Five beasts which were as long as a  sideboard. They had hoppers for  1000s of pages of paper, and stackers for thousands more. We never sat down in the print room, we just kind of perched, it could reach 30 degrees once all the printers/copiers were all fired up. Our room, the print room was next door to the law library, it so quiet and us so noisy, so I hid a copy of my comic novel The Butcher The Baker and The Undertaker  in amongst the law books.

The best thing about the print room was the scrap paper, as if the paper got creased in any way it could not be used in the machines so it was recycled. I asked and was allowed to take some scrap paper home, and that is why my daughters are such good artists, because of the kindness of the law firm, and all the scrap paper.

I am a writer so that involves paper too, though I just want people to buy paper, books that have my words on. Nine books on Amazon now. Our cat Totoro like paper too, if you scrunch up paper she comes running because she can play football with the paper. If you scrunch up a banknote she will come running too, a writer’s cat loves paper. I just hope one day I sell my stories, so that the cat can come running to the sound of banknotes.