The task was presented as a simple one. There were 8 PDF files on Emp. Peng.'s laptop that needed to be printed out and collated while he was off tending to other obligations this evening. However, tasks delegated to me are never quite as easy as the delegator intends, owing to my uncanny ability to find the most difficult way humanly possible to accomplish any given task. In a stunning display of efficiency, or at least what passes as efficiency when I am involved, I went through Plans A through D in just 20 minutes before achieving success with Plan E.
Plan A: Plug printer into laptop. Plan A failed when the laptop repeatedly failed to make a connection to the printer. An hour and a half and four plans later, Emp. Peng. pointed out that the laptop was trying to make a connection to a different printer. This revelation came too late to be useful.
Plan B: Save files to jump drive and print the files from the jump drive through the desktop. Plan B failed because I could not figure out which, if any, of the USB peripherals could be unplugged without sacrificing functionality vital to the task or the parallel task I had started (calling PengMom on the VOIP phone). The printer was also necessary, as were the mouse and the external hard drive containing the Windows side of the desktop. I might have done without the outboard speakers, but there was the slight problem of figuring out which plug went to the speakers.
Plan C: Combine plans A and B, taking the files saved to the jump drive and attach my laptop directly to the printer. Plan C failed because my laptop, recently upgraded to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, was being fussy and not wanting to open PDF documents.
Plan D: Since the jump drive was already in my laptop, I would email the PDF files to myself, check email on the desktop, and print the attachments from there. This plan was discarded without trying it, in a rare instance of me discerning that it was unnecessarily complicated and stupid, even for a plan I came up with.
Plan E: Unplug the printer, plug the jump drive into the USB port formerly occupied by the printer, copy the files onto the desktop, remove the jump drive, reattach the printer, and print. Success! Please, no emails from smartypantses who would have tried Plan E closer to Plan A or B.
1 comment:
Unable to determine which can be unplugged? Leave them all in, and borrow another 4-way USB connector to daisy-chain with your existing one. We have one on each computer here, in this house. (And an unpowered spare).
Nimrod
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