There was a blue cloud of invective roiling from my study this week. There were muffled screams of rage and howls of frustration. When I emerged, at periodic intervals, for food and (yet) more coffee, the family cast me wary looks and tiptoed around in silence. It was obvious something had gone badly wrong.

What had gone wrong was my printer. I had asked it to print some photographs and it had, figuratively speaking, stuck its tongue out at me and blown a big fat raspberry. It then hunched a shoulder and sulked.

Oh no – it didn’t just go totally quiet: it would occasionally spit out half a page of printing and whirr meaningfully to itself. I didn’t have to speak “printer” to know what it was saying. Apparently, I was utterly unreasonable in my demands and so I was being punished.

I switched it off and back on again and restarted my computer. I ran the printer trouble-shooter. I found a YouTube tutorial and did technical stuff with the printer spooler, deleting all the files and restarting it again. I removed the printer from my computer and reinstalled it. And then I did it all again. When the printer decided it wasn’t going to talk to the WiFi either, I connected it up with a cable and – (sigh) did it all again.

Oh, it sounds so simple and quick when I list it all in one paragraph, doesn’t it! Let me tell you I spent hours on that blasted thing: HOURS!

I looked up replacements and talked loudly about their attributes, but my recalcitrant printer merely whirred at me again. It wasn’t dead, just sulking.

I was utterly stumped. I shut everything down and went to bed.

No bright ideas occurred to me overnight, but I did go onto my favourite Facebook group to express my frustration.

Several of the group came up with suggested solutions – all of which I had already tried. They came up with alternative solutions: feed it wine; take an axe to it; kick it around the room a bit (I didn’t try any of those, although the last was tempting). Then someone suggested I download the latest printer driver from the manufacturer and try reinstalling it from ground up.

“Aha,” I thought. That’s something I haven’t tried yet.

So, I tried that, and it WORKED! My printer is now printing again.

I tell you the story because, this morning, another friend was asking for advice regarding her insomnia. As I did, she received many replies: some sensible and some very silly. She thought she had tried everything, but some of our ideas were new to her. She now has more ideas to try. They may work, they may not – but at least she can try them.

We can often feel we are completely stumped. We have run out of ideas and are at the end of our resources.

But there’s always another thing to try. We just have to keep asking.

Mary

A Moodscope member.