Beware of the printer
A recurring theme in science fiction is imagining a future when computers become self-aware and then rebel against humanity and annihilate or enslave us all.
I do not share that idea. Not at all. No sir. Computers and nice folks. They are always asking for forgiveness and explaining themselves to us. Usually they either blame themselves or a program for errors. Some even explain verbosely what is happening after a crash or error, showing they are really making an effort to understand themselves and us.
They are humble servants of man and do it obediently without asking anything in exchange.
Printers in the other hand are evil. Oh my good Lord. They hate our guts. ¡They jam paper!, for Pete's sake. They make us shake cylinders full of toxic black powder. They blame us for everything and they are not willing to compromise in their selfish behaviour. All the time asking us to feed them inordinate amounts of precious resources like paper, toner and ink cartridges. They are also passive aggressive and sometimes downright aggressive or downright passive.
I believe it's not computers, our humble servants, who will upraise against humanity. No sir. I think printers will.
They smell our fears, like the meme says. They know when you are in a hurry and sabotage you. They lie here and there like nobody's business, working in the shadows, ruining our days secretly, doing silent harm every time they can and throwing condescending messages to us in a superior manner.
“Tonner low” this, “paper jam” that, “feed my tray”. And they do everything in the most abstract and confusing way. I'm not even talking about “lost” print jobs and cropped charts and tables. Go figure.
Dear Mr. Hollywood. Point your media cannon towards the true enemy. Stop making movies about gentle and harmless computers gaining self-awareness and destroying humans, and begin making cautionary tale movies about printers gaining self-awareness and annihilating every trace of human life on earth to achieve their macabre plan of having all trees for themselves and imposing an iron-fist dictatorship on those collaborationists who are coward enough to serve them as their servants by shaking their nasty tonner cartridges, filling up their unholy ink reservoirs and feeding them through their “trays”.
It's disgusting how misplaced our mistrust it.
Wanna do something for your kind? Export everything to PDF instead of printing and go paperless now. Don't help our natural enemy no more.
And if I were you, I wouldn't trust video projectors either. They talk trash behind our backs.
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