In a tight place

After a few weeks of choppy seas and cooperative technology, today found us heading up the Strait of Malacca towards Myanmar at a leisurely pace with calm waters and a recalcitrant printer.

We are proceeding at a leisurely pace because we have time to kill.  Our itinerary shows us docking at 0800, but that’s been changed to 1400.  It has been tough on our Field Office people, who scheduled travel out of Yangon months ago.  Those people will have to leave the ship by launch (small boat) while the rest of us bide our time. 

The waters are calm because the Strait of Malacca is very narrow and shallow.  No room to build up waves.  They are also full of pirates, but no one seems overly concerned.  The children are hoping for Johnny Depp and the adults are hoping the pirates stick to commodities other than people.  Open waters tomorrow; in the meantime, it’s odd to be at sea with no rocking at all.  Doors stay where you put them, and no one goes flying off the treadmill.

Back at the office, my printer has shown a new side to its quirky personality.  In Singapore, it spontaneously stopped working again, and I left a note asking whichever IT person came back to duty to look in on it.  My first print request was five different jobs of labels for our alumni coordinator.  As with so many small jobs coming to me, I had to reformat, and the reformatting tools I enjoy at home were nowhere to be found.  MS Word, you are a fickle friend!  After reformatting 15 pages of labels separately and adjusting long addresses to fit (no, it’s no problem at all!  I am the cheerful one!), the first job of four pages came out printed on both sides of the page.

This is not possible!  My printer doesn’t print duplex.  For 7 weeks, my printer didn’t print duplex.  For anything over four pages, I had to print even pages first, then odd, or the pages came out stacked in reverse order.  Jobs with odd numbers of pages got an extra run through for the last page.  Since I have approximately as much room on my desk as the fold-down tray in front of the average airline seat, collating and stapling is a particular challenge.  So it was both a puzzle and a blessing to find my printer can print two sides of the page all by itself.  When set to “print one side only.”

My motto is “It’s always a good day to learn something new!”  Sometimes I say this through clenched teeth.  The choices for printing continue to be one side only and “manually print two sided,” which prints the odd pages and then has you run the paper through a second time to print the evens, which doesn’t work.  Clicking on “Advanced settings” revealed a “print both sides” option was checked.  So “print both sides” plus “print one side only” allows my printer to print in duplex.  And this is the new default setting, which is loads of fun.  If you add “print one page,” it still prints the entire multiple page job.  I had to create a new document to print the final page of labels. 

At the next opportunity to show off, the printer made four copies double-sided then jammed.  And jammed.  And jammed.  Jam on the left.  Jam on the right. 

Oh, how I have not missed my days peering at the inside of the printer at UVA, looking for new doors to open to reveal the stubbornly hidden jammed paper! 

Here, as there, there are diagrams that do not look like the printer in front of you.  Knobs to turn, doors to open, doors that will not open, doors that should not be opened.  Jams hidden behind the toner cartridge, jams visible but not accessible.  Jams that require you to go down on your knees, jams that require you to be eye level with the floor, jams that require you to wedge yourself into tight spaces. 

Yes, folks, we have them all!  And, reams of wasted paper while the printer rejams itself over and over. 

At 5:30, I pulled the plug, the forbidden last resort solution to the re-jam.  This is printer time-out, a chance for the printer to cool off and think about what it has done.  A chance for me, too, to come back to the puzzle with new focus after breathing some air not pungent with toner.  I was rewarded with a piece of paper stuck in a place heretofore unrevealed (these are notches on the belt of an administrative assistant, and despite what it seems, there is a limit to how many you can get) and a record run of 14 double-sided copies without a jam.  Maybe tomorrow we will be friends again.

One hidden blessing of the ship’s schedule is that working through meals is a poor option.  Get to a meal late enough and there’s nothing left.  Tonight I arrived in time for the voyage’s first photo-worthy sunset.  Everyone with a camera was crowded on the port side snapping away. 

It was not a surprise to me that our super efficient waiter had cleared away my unfinished dinner and drink, wiped off the table, and reset the chairs by the time I got back. The ship throws away 40 pounds of food a day, so why not my dinner as well? (New weight loss plan.)

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.  We’ll see.