Who invented the new technology gadgets that we all rely on these days? The computer is complicated, but not so much that a ten year old child cannot dig into the insides and recognise all the internal bits that baffle many adults who find them incomprehensible. Then there are the supporting peripheries like the scanner, printer and screen.

How irksome was it then, to buy a new printer and ink cartridges, in January this year, only to try and read the instructions (in seven different languages) as to how to marry the printer to its ink. Talk about instructions on building ‘flat pack’ furniture you would need a degree to insert ink cartridges into a malignant machine.

Yes, I did eventually manage to win and months passed without any problems with printing. Soon, all too soon, the screen came up with a message that ‘ink levels were low’! Armed with a note of the make and number of the cartridges I needed to buy, Tesco’s were happy to provide replacements.

With a vague memory of my initial setting up of the computer, I arrived home with the new plastic cartridges. Even just to open the packages were difficult. Scissors might have been blunt but the ridiculously unyielding plastic packaging tested my patience to destruction. I eventually released the cartridges. Naked cartridges in hand I ventured forth. My printer waited for my clumsy attempts to penetrate its inner workings. No I did not remember where, or how, I had set the printer up in January. Despite my failure to locate the original paperwork, I thought, it couldn’t be difficult, ‘surely all I needed to do is reverse the way I removed the old print cartridges?’

How wrong could I was! The printer is beneath my computer desk, which made life very hard. I disconnected it from the electric and computer link and put it on the desk. Now I could see the cartridges, but trying very hard I couldn’t extract the old cartridges. After an hour I gave up and called a neighbours child in to help me. It was with some embarrassment that the boy gently explained to me – as if I was an demented-  that the printer needed to be plugged into the electricity so that the cartridges could be removed.  Putting the printer beneath the desk and connecting it again meant we could do the job in just moments. He’d ejected the old cartridges and put the new ones in. And I felt like a dinosaur.

Mike