The Anti-Robinhood
You know, where you rob from the poor to give to the rich? Sounds like I’m talking about our tax system, but no. My wife, Carol, chose the education sector as her 2nd career. First high school and now elementary (Grade 2). Either way, It’s one of the few jobs that does not follow the norm where you bring office supplies home for personal use. Instead, you steal home supplies to fund your work. How fucked is that? You want to succeed. More importantly, you want your kids to succeed. But you’re just not provided the means to make that happen other than a room and pedestal. Turns out heating and cooling is optional too.
As a parents we always resented having to get that supply list at the beginning of the year. Sending my son to a private school I resented it even more. Bitch, I’m paying for this education. Don’t be charging me and then giving me a list of shit I’ve got to buy. Charge me more for the cost of the school instead. Goddamn. But I digress. Not sure if it was just me but when I was in school all essential supplies were provided by the school. We took this resentment with us into our 2nd careers and we buy all the supplies her children need. There is nothing like seeing a semi-truck offloading a pallet of composition books in your driveway with a forklift. True story bro. Shoot, we even bought a scantron at one point so she wouldn’t be spending 5 hours grading 150 tests.
At one point, she was given an “allowance” of what turned out to be 3 sheets of paper per student per month, due to the insane amount of students she was responsible for. The school actually tracked that shit and cut you off when your limit was met. That’s when I got her the Xerox Workcenter. A veritable workhorse. Peripheral supplies included toner and paper. Xerox was a good/bad choice. Good in that it was a great multifunction device. Flatbed scanner, document fed scanner. Scan to email. Copy machine. Loved it. The bad? Only Xerox will work on it around here. Not sure if that’s everywhere or just my particular area here in the the desert southwest. As soon as you tell them it’s a Xerox all bets are off. Eventually the scanning component quit working, which included making copies. Minor inconvenience. She used it mainly for mass printing from her computer. It cost less just to buy a cheap scanner for when I needed that particular feature and I did.
After 7 faithful, hard years, some plastic flap from inside fell off. That flap is part of a larger component that would cost around $200 to replace. Another $200 for the part that would fix the scanning. That’s if I do it myself. An additional $200 for the Xerox on-site Maytag repairman to show up and do it for the first hour only. That was my motivation to look at some of the new devices out there. I’m already up to $400-600. That sounds like a new machine to me. Xerox was definitely off my list from a service perspective. I settled on the HP Laserjet Pro M282. It has everything I was looking for including built in email server for quick scan to emails that I enjoy. Plus it’s rated for up to 2500 copies per month. Carol approved.
I wanted to order it off Amazon, but they wouldn’t deliver to my pickup locations – said it was too heavy. I didn’t want it sitting outside my house during the day. That led me to checking out Best Buy. Wow. Been over a decade since I stepped inside a Best Buy. Technically, I didn’t step in side this one either. Curb side pick up baby. Last time I bought something from Best Buy was when X-Files and Star Trek seasons were just being released as new on New Movie/Music Tuesdays. Remember those?
Pulled it out of the box this morning. Peeled off all those hold-in-place sticker. Plugged it and fired it up. They still come with a power cord, USB cord, and telephone cord (people still use those?). There is a nice user manual on the website I’ve downloaded. I’ve already set up the email account on my mail server for use in scan-to-email functions. Might have it up and running by the weekend.