Printers

For God's sake.

Do printers come with firmware that exists to make your life a misery? Like when you have, say, half an hour to print out your assignment, have a shower, hand it in and then get some food before going to the cinema – in this case, you need the printer to be on your team. "Come on, Epson fuckface," you cheerily say. "It's your time to shine."

This is when the piece of shit decides that black ink is no longer to be distributed. Oh, it'll go through the motions, leaving you confident of success as you go to get a drink hearing the familiar scheeeeez-scheeeeez in the background as it cranks out the paper, but when you come back to attach the sheets to your assignment form, they're blank. Ho ho.

Of course, getting the computer to clean the nozzles (twice) will get things going along soon enough. The problem with this is that, well, it uses up ink. So you're basically pissing your precious poisonous black liquid up the wall, along with your money, which is really annoying when cartridges cost so much. Which is why I bought a third party cartridge. And I want to stress, there's nothing wrong with it – it's the printer. As soon as I installed it a little window popped up gleefully informing me that this detected unofficial cartridge might cause my printer to 'malfunction' and sure enough, it did. It annoys me because the cartridge works fine after performing this mandatory, ink-wasting nozzle cleaning, and there's no reason for it.

Unless, as I suspect, printers come equipped with firmware that cause you hell when you use a cartridge made by another company. Bring me a laser printer! Bring me toner! Ink, die in hell – and you too, Epson.