on miracle printers

Tonight again, I noticed that my shampoo bottle is almost empty. Though I haven’t been keeping exact track, it seems like I’m at the store buying more shampoo almost constantly. And the toothpaste seems to get used up faster than ever these days.

By contrast, everyone has probably had the experience of certain “miracle products.” A particular Turkish brand of shaving cream often found in Cairo seems miraculous in this respect. I can’t always find it when I want to buy it, but when I do buy it, it seems to last forever. The last one I had never even ran out, but was confiscated from my hand luggage at an airport for security reasons. It had already lasted many months and might have lasted many more.

And at the moment, I am in the midst of a miraculous run on my printer’s toner cartridge. It has now lasted for 13 months of heavy use, during which time I have printed multiple drafts of numerous lectures and articles, not to mention university administrative documents. I’ve printed God knows how many full drafts of L’objet quadruple to take with me to cafés to mark up, as well as the whole of Meillassoux’s massive L’inexistence divine. How long can this go on? I was sweating it just now, worried that I wouldn’t get away with one last draft of the book, but it just finished printing a few minutes ago.

There’s an odd story behind this printer, too.

When moving to Cairo to teach here, you’re allowed a certain weight of shipments at AUC expense. My strategy was to use my entire weight allowance on books, confining my clothing to whatever I could fit in luggage on the plane. A printer seemed both like a bad way to use up weight, and also likely to be badly damaged in transit and hence useless anyway. For this reason, I sold my last printer before leaving Chicago. That was a Brother, which for a short while was making the only USB printer that worked for the early gumdrop-looking iMacs (I still have fond memories of my Bondi Blue one).

I did lots of printing at home during the Chicago years, going through many toner cartridges as a matter of course. In Cairo, I got into the habit of doing my printing at the office, which meant doing less of it (much of my typical printing was ruled “personal” by Departmental budget authorities, and so I had to limit my previous habits or find other places to print it).

In April 2005, when lecturing at Duquesne, I stayed with Dan Selcer, who was a fellow DePaul grad student years earlier. I admired his nifty little HP 1012 Laser Jet, and was delighted when he told me how little it cost. So I ordered one myself, and took it back to Egypt with me, somehow talking my way out of paying duties on it (Egypt has fairly draconian policies when it comes to imported electronic goods or software).

And then… I never got around to setting it up. Why not? Because my academic lifestyle had become so shaped by the habit of printing smaller amounts and only on Department of Philosophy equipment that I unconsciously held onto that lifestyle, even though it was inconvenient, and even though I now owned a nice piece of equipment that rendered it delightfully obsolete.

You may think I’m making this up, but from April 2005-October 2008, or 42 months, I left my little HP printer sitting in the box, unopened. Luckily, I had that box propped up a bit off the floor, or the printer would have been destroyed by my catastrophic house flood last year, in which the entire flat was under 2 inches of water when I woke up one morning (due to a burst washing machine hose, apparently bitten by a rat lurking in the walls of the complex).

Those 42 months also happened to encompass the entire lifespan of the computer with which the printer was simultaneously purchased. It was almost like the printer was put in cryogenic storage and skipped a computer lifetime, as if waiting to work with a better computer.

In October 2008 I finally told myself one day: “wait, this is ridiculous. Why haven’t I opened the printer yet?” And so I did, and it works perfectly. And it has a miracle toner cartridge.