Why did our technical lives get so complicated?

I am a contractor for a major out of state university. In order to get expenses reimbursed, I have to fill out a form. An awful form at that.

They send me a link to the PDF file. I open it in preview and I cannot edit it. Fine. I download Acrobat Reader, which lets me edit the forms but it will not let me save the document, or print to PDF! I have to print it out and scan it back in to email it. ugh.

So now its weeks later and I need to mail in the real form. My Canon IPX 4200 printer is out of three inks. I check into various laser printers, etc and finally decide to just print the two sheets via kinkos.

Kinkos charges 11 cents per page, so two sheets is 22 cents. Except that they have a $1 minimal order. Fine. I have them print 9 blank expense forms. The order sheet informs me my print job will be done at 3pm, which is 3 miles away, but near the grocery store, so I’ll kill two birds with one trip.

At 3:30 I head to Kinkos and they say my job was “suspended.” After 20 mins of looking around, they finally decide to just print it on a laser writer. Only the expense PDF from hell prints out in Klingon. Its a mess. So I walk out with my one good sheet. Damn.

A highly recommended color laser is $280 and toner lasts a LONG time, but with the uncertainty of my job, I decide to spring for the $70 of ink, which carts have special chips on them that unless I want to mess around with knives and such, I am stuck paying $14/color.

I head off to the store and then home. I plug the 2 empty inks in (I bought all five because I am smart) and sure enough, the other three start blinking. Ok I replace those and the lights on the printer are happy.

Except the Airport Extreme N basestation isn’t. It can’t see the printer. Damnit. So I cycle the printer, unplug the power to the printer, unplug the USB, nothing. Says no printer. Apple discussions say to reboot router.

What the hell. I have people on Skype, etc, I can’t reboot my router just to make a printer or disk show up. Damn you Apple. Get some quality assurance on the Airport team ok? And fix the Sonicwall VPN issue too!

Anyway, I happen to have just set up my old Tibook as a PPC code test machine so I run the printer into that, download the canon drivers, reboot, turn on print sharing and I can finally print.

Total time: Four hours.

Why did our technical lives get so complicated?