Kage Baker did not deal with machinery. She interfaced with it gingerly, tolerating moving parts and current as long as they did their jobs quietly and required no attention from her. At the first sign of rebellion, she’d abandon her computer for pen and ink. A steel-nibbed pen with a wooden staff, by preference And an ink bottle.
I’d fix the fiendish thingie.
Yestreday the printer began making strange grating noises – not when it was printing, which it steadfastly refused to do, but at odd intervals and random. Many unique forms of origami (reminiscent of the Jerome K. Jerome’s invulnerable pineapple tin) emerged from it, having been altered from simple text into shapes previously unknown to Mankind.
I did not fix the fiendish thingie. I spent most of today not fixing it, too.
Therefore, I am on my way to make the rounds of Best Buy, Fry’s, Staples, Target, Offices Depot and Max, and Harga’s House of Discount Printers. I hope to replace the zombie on my filing cabinet with a fresh djinn that will do my bidding.
Tomorrow: back to the NICE monsters.
Kathleen, Kage and the Company 
Thanks so much for your site. I’m truly enjoying each entry.
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You don’t need a new printer; you need an Enforcer with a flint axe.
After that, you need a new printer.
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Oh, Tom, I would have sooo many uses for an Enforcer with a flint axe! In the meantime, though, I do have a new printer, all set up and everything – the hard crawling-under-the-desk bits to connect things were accomplished by my ever-obliging nephew.
Researching making the flint axes was a wild time, BTW, and a considerable giggle. Budu’s observations on articificial sinew being just as good as the real thing were drawn from direct real-world experience.
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When I was working on That Damn TV Show, one of the things I wanted to do was get some of the four-thousand-year-old cypress lumber one of our interviews had raised from the bottom of a Mississippi creek. That for a shaft, and some cast composite polymer for an axehead – 21st century Enforcer gear fit for an author’s mantle. Destiny and fate had other ideas . . .
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