One thing leads to another in the morning. You decide to use the inkjet printer instead of the laser because you haven’t used the inkjet in a while and those cartridges tend to dry out. Let’s be honest, HP didn’t make cartridges to last. How many of you bought an HP printer which came with “starter cartridges?” You remember those things don’t you? Right about the time you finished printing the alignment page as part of the installation the “out of ink” dialogs start popping up. Fine, fine, honest and ethical company.
Just gonna be one of those days it looks like.
inkjet out of ink
After printing one page, the yellow complains it is empty. Well, if I have more cartridges for this thing they are in the bottom of the printer stand.
Cabinet Under Printer Stand
Now where the (^&)(*&)(* is the key? The only reason I ever locked thing was this cheap “assembly required” printer stand didn’t come with magnetic door latches. If you don’t lock the cabinet, the doors just swing open on their own. There is far more to steal in my office than anything which could fit in that cabinet. Usually just a bunch of old specialty paper.
The key. It used to be in the spare paper tray for one of the Lexmark laster printers I owned and that used to be stored on the shelf just above this cabinet. I say “spare” but it really was “no longer required.” When I bought the 500+ sheet feeder and duplexer for it, the single standard tray had to be removed. That printer went to recycling long ago though. (Hmmm… if the cartridges have been in the cabinet that long would they still be any good? Do I really only have more envelops and paper in there?)
After taking everything out and dusting the shelves for the first time in . . . years? . . . I come to the sad conclusion the key is not there. Oh shit. I didn’t put it in “the drawer,” did I? Oh come on, you’ve all got one of them. I have a drawer and several cabinets which look just like it, and that’s not counting the shelves. Stuff you thought you needed or otherwise could not bring yourself to throw out. If you think the featured image is bad, I probably shouldn’t tell you that was after spending close to an hour taking everything out of it into a box, finally tossing a bunch of stuff I will never use again. Business cards from people who are no longer on the sunny side of the daisies. Business cards from people who are now three jobs beyond that card working for different company in different state. Not to mention all of those adapters which somehow got tossed and forgotten.
Why take everything out and only put back in what I _really_ wanted to keep? The initial rummage turned up lots of computer case keys, but not the key I was looking for. You kids don’t remember computer case keys, do you? Same keys older upright freezers came with because every upright freezer was required to come with a lock. (There was a time when little kids playing hide & seek would hide in the freezer and suffocate, so freezers had to come with locks. Usually it was an abandoned or “spare” freezer that wasn’t currently running.) Probably should have taken a picture of the keys before I tossed them into the “prepared metal” recycling bucket. (Prepared metal, usually steel, is what recycling companies call metal cut into lengths under two feet. They pay more for it, so we always put our smaller junk parts in one place in the shop.)
I wonder if any of you Millenials even have any idea what these are?
Keyboard adapters
Quit cheating by looking at the caption. Even though I told you I bet you still don’t know. The original IBM PC keyboard had a DIN connector. That great big round thing with pins. Later we got the mini-DIN (also called PS/2) connector which came with the IBM PS/2. If you wanted to connect a newer keyboard to and older motherboard you needed to have one of these adapters. Somewhere, in my boxes and shelves of stuff, I have adapter cables which even go the other way. They let you connect and XT keyboard to a PS/2 or newer motherboard.
As a traveling consultant I had to cobble together a lot of computers so I always carried a parcel of adapters and cables. Sadly, I still do. Oh, I don’t have to carry parallel printer and SCSI cables anymore, but USB to micro-USB to lots of other things. Even after 30 years in IT I still need to carry around serial cables because the bulk of industrial control will remain hard wired RS-232 long after my demise. In fact, I just got a call from a pimp offering $100/hr because I knew how to do serial programming for an embedded system and they were having massive trouble finding someone.
Sadly, “the drawer” didn’t yield the keys I was looking for. Keys to vehicles I no longer own and keys to mystery cabinets yes. But not the cabinet keys I wanted.
Just one of those days.
