A bad day

It’s not often I have a bad day. I’m just a pretty happy go lucky guy. Even when the world is falling apart around me, I just kinda press on and try to be happy about it. But yesterday was pretty frustrating. I’ve been working on a fairly large direct mail project for the last week or so. On Sunday evening, my printer quit feeding paper. I had printed out a lot of the project and was just getting to the more ‘important’ part (the part that’s harder to farm out) – the reply cards with the addresses on them.

So there I was with a broken printer and about 4000 pages left to print. I found a place about an hour and a half away that can fix the printer quickly, but I also needed to get the mail merge done so I could take it to a friend who offered to bail me out of this bind. That’s when things really started to get frustrating.

I quit using Windows about two years ago. I’ve been running Mandrake Linux ever since and loving it. Now I remember why! The software I decided to use for mail sorting runs on Windows. So I dug out a Windows machine and ran the sort. Well, it wasn’t *quite* that simple, but close enough. The problem is, the barcoding font only seems to work with Windows. That means I had to do the addressed cards in Windows, too. Well this old Packard Bell (garbage) P2-266 with Windows ME (garbage) is just not stable enough to… well… do anything at all. If it wern’t for the high price of windows, I may well have thrown it out mine sometime yesterday.

I never did get the printer out the door, but I got the document done enough to send off to my ‘savior’ last night who claims to be working busily printing the remainder of the job. He has almost the same printer as me (a Phaser 850… I’ve got an 840) so we can both print black for free (basically). I’m soooo glad he offered to help out.

So this morning, I’m off to take the printer in and get it fixed. Hopefully it won’t break the bank. And hopefully today will go better than yesterday…

V-