Making the Printer Work

It is 2026. We were promised hoverboards, self-lacing Nikes, and DeLorean time machines. I am still trying to get the printer on Wi-Fi.

It is 2026, in the year of our Lord.

By now, according to the future I was promised, we should have hoverboards. We should have self-lacing Nikes. There should be DeLoreans casually ripping holes in the space-time continuum, preferably while leaving twin trails of fire down the street.

Instead, I am sitting in my house trying to get a fucking printer connected to Wi-Fi.

I have been working in IT for more than two decades.

This does not help.

Some problems are apparently timeless.

To be fair, the printer is new. The previous one was one of those refillable-ink models that was supposed to free me from the tyranny of $47 cartridges containing approximately three teaspoons of ink. It worked pretty well right up until the ink decided it would rather be outside the printer and leaked onto one of the built-in circuit boards.

Apparently electronics remain surprisingly particular about this.

So I bought another printer.

And then began the ancient ritual.

Turn it on. Install the app. Find the printer. Don’t find the printer. Put the printer into Wi-Fi setup mode. Find the printer. Select the network. Enter the password. Wait.

Nothing.

Try again.

At some point, you begin questioning things you were previously quite confident about. Is this actually my Wi-Fi password? Am I on the right network? Is the printer on 2.4 GHz? Does it hate WPA3? Does my router hate printers? Did I accidentally create some bizarre network isolation rule three years ago and completely forget about it?

Is this somehow my fault?

And eventually, inevitably:

Is it DNS?

At least this time it wasn’t DNS.

I think.

The future we were promised. The printer was apparently left out of the forecast.

The ridiculous thing about working in technology for a long time is that experience doesn’t eliminate these moments. If anything, it just gives you a much larger catalog of possible reasons why the stupid thing isn’t working.

Twenty-plus years ago, I might have thought, “The printer won’t connect.”

Now I can construct seventeen increasingly unlikely failure scenarios involving DHCP leases, multicast discovery, wireless bands, firmware, network segmentation, stale configuration, drivers, operating-system permissions, and whatever fresh hell the printer manufacturer has hidden inside its mobile app.

Meanwhile, someone who has never worked in IT will unplug the printer, plug it back in, and fix it.

There is probably a leadership lesson buried in here somewhere about expertise, complexity, and our tendency to overthink problems.

But tonight I don’t want the leadership lesson.

I just want the fucking printer to print.

And somewhere in 1989, Doc Brown is profoundly disappointed in all of us.