Printer error
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 157
DISPOSSESSIONS DEP'T.
Dispossessions: HP LaserJet Pro M404dw Printer
THE LAST STRAW with the HP LaserJet Pro M404dw was when I realized, at long last, that I was sick of waiting for a last straw. The younger child's piano teacher had emailed over a pdf of a marked-up sheet of music, and I'd received it and opened it on my phone and sent it to the printer, wireless device to wireless device to wireless device, but where the file was supposed to reenter the physical world, the paper jammed. I had to get up and trudge across the room and open up the front of the printer and yank the densely crumpled music out. In that moment, seething with real fury at the overly inanimate inanimate object, I resolved that I was going to print the music out on a different printer, a brand-new printer, a printer that wasn't so reliably unreliable or predictably unpredictable.
A few days before, the printer had jammed while the older child was printing some essential paperwork for crossing the border—not quite at the last minute, but with the last minute in view. He cleared the jam and got the documents printed. By comparison, the sheet music was no crisis at all. It was the very fact that the music didn't matter that brought on the necessary clarity: there was going to be a real crisis someday, a moment when I absolutely did need a hard copy of something right away, and in that moment, if I was still using the HP LaserJet Pro M404dw, it was going to betray me. And if it did, I would deserve it.
It took me a long, long time to accept that the printer was a piece of shit. My micro-generation arrived at college at the bottom of a particularly deep trough in the personal-computing hardware cycle: I got the last model of Macintosh that still booted up from floppy discs, and my classmates and I spent our first two years sending files from those floppies to rattling dot-matrix printers, spilling out our work in bleary stippled lettering on sprocket-feed fanfold paper, to be torn apart on the perforations and collated by hand while hurrying out the door. Then Apple brought out the Stylewriter, a marvelously stripped down and compact little inkjet. When an important paper was due, something that deserved better than dot-matrix, we would go to someone who'd made the jump to owing a Stylewriter and stand by in admiration that gradually tightened into panic as it put out text that could have passed for actual printed matter, o n e l i n e a t a t i m e , e x c r u c i a t i n g l y s l o w l y .
Then, my senior year, I got an external hard drive and a Hewlett-Packard DeskJet. The DeskJet was a miracle! It cranked out multiple pages a minute, in typefaces that looked like typefaces. Technology was just going to keep on getting better and faster and more useful. Wasn't it?
Now here was my 21st century printer, jamming instead of printing. I knew, rationally, that Hewlett-Packard had gone through a lot in the decades since I got my DeskJet. Technically, the LaserJet Pro M404dw was not even a Hewlett-Packard project; the Wikipedia page for Hewlett-Packard is written in the past tense. The company that sold the LaserJet Pro M404dw is called "HP," just the letters. But confidence in Hewlett-Packard was lodged deep inside my mind, deeper than outside evidence could reach. I had welcomed the LaserJet into my home with the tragic, misplaced enthusiasm of a loyal American auto buyer parking a brand-new 1979 Dodge Diplomat coupe under the carport, proud to be investing in a solid piece of Detroit iron instead of that ticky-tack Japanese crap.
As the years went by, though, the image of the printer in my mind got mangled and smeared with toner. The LaserJet Pro M404dw was a lemon, surly and underperforming. The paper jams were just a fact of life, even though we kept it supplied with the nice Hammermill paper. It would jam in the front, so I'd have to pull out the toner cartridge to get at the trapped paper; it would jam in the back, so I'd have to drag it out of its niche and away from the wall to open it up and tug the paper out that way. It would jam strictly in its own tiny, mechanical imagination, and insist it was jammed until each place where the paper could have been stuck (but wasn't) had been opened up and inspected and shut again.
It jammed so frequently while trying to print two-sided pages that we just stopped trying to print two-sided pages. Long documents would have to go through single-sided, which meant the printer would run out of paper in the middle of the job, which meant—well, if the LaserJet Pro M404dw ran out of paper in the middle of a print job, it would give up on the whole thing.
And by "the whole thing," I mean the entire enterprise of being a printer. Not only would it abandon that part-finished print job and forget it had ever existed, even after the paper tray was reloaded, but often enough it would ignore any attempt to send over a replacement print order. It would profess to be on the network while refusing to respond to any actual communications on the network, until it was turned off and on again. Sometimes it had to be turned off more than once before it would come back around.
Every once in a while I would wistfully read the legendary printer-recommendation article on the Verge, where Nilay Patel told the reader to "just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again" and then padded out the rest of the article with ChatGPT text so search engines wouldn't downrank it for being too short and vague. A printer you didn't have to think about, a printer that would simply work—amazing! Amazing and unattainable, as long as the LaserJet Pro M404dw was squatting there on its little cart between the bookcase and the heater cabinet, where I would have to crouch down every time I needed to wrangle with it. But I would end up with a document, eventually, right? Even if I also ended up with some crumpled paper and a throbbing blood vessel in my neck and 15 minutes of my life irrevocably wasted. I couldn't just get a new printer when we already had a printer.
Why not? my wife asked me. We'd had the HP for years. It had been terrible for years. What if it never did break? What if it kept on not working right, steadily, forever?
I Googled the most up-to-date version of the Verge piece, clicked the Amazon link for a Brother printer, and bought it. It was $130. Free one-day delivery. There was a little nonsense with introducing the Brother to the network, after I'd unplugged the HP and put the new printer in its spot, and there would be more than a little nonsense in getting it to talk to a Windows machine, but soon enough I told it to print the music and it printed the music.
My younger son asked if we could do the Office Space scene, the one where the protagonists, armed with a baseball bat, abduct the office printer to a vacant lot and stomp and bludgeon it to rubble, in a frenzy of vengeance and liberation. I more than appreciated the urge, but we settled for leaving it at the curb beside the bagged recycling, complete with its cord. Within an hour or two, some enterprising passerby had carried it off. I hope they strip it for parts. God forbid they plug it in and try to use it.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, September 2, 2025
★★★★★ Voices of people up and about carried into the apartment. An airplane like a tiny model embedded in pristine Lucite was crossing the sky. Fine bits of cloud clustered and clumped into strange patterns within patterns, like iron filings in a magnetic field or sand on a Chladni plate. Storefronts stood open. A ten-minute stretch of indoor dimness, behind a closed door, brought on the urge to flee to the bright sidewalk outside. One big gray cloud suddenly appeared above the afternoon, accompanied by gusts, delivered its warning against complacency, then departed, leaving the rest of the day to its tall and shining brethren.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of sandwiches selected from Aunt Josephine's Book of Recipes, by Josephine M. Wallace, published in 1923 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
LETTUCE SANDWICHES
Spread butter on thin slices of bread; place a lettuce leaf between each; cut in fancy shapes.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
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