By Tim Sanders

In past columns I may have given the impression that both my wife and I are technologically impaired. I would like to state here and now, unequivocally, that the reason I may have given readers that impression is because we are technologically impaired.

We can’t help it. The part of the brain that allows people to program universal remotes, to operate DVD players, to put all of those annoying little tunes into their cell phones, or to decipher detailed computer instructions, was obviously damaged when we were children. I think in my case it was due to a claw hammer which was dropped on my cerebrum by a gentleman who was helping my dad finish our garage roof (he swore it was an accident). Marilyn claims she never had anything dropped on her head, but her technological ineptitude would indicate otherwise. It was probably a bowling ball.

Take our printer, for example. I won’t mention the manufacturer’s name, because I don’t want to be sued by Hewlett Packard. Suffice it to say that even Bill Gates would have trouble with it. It was the very latest, state-of-the-art computer printer available four years ago when I bought it, which means that now it’s as obsolete as a buggy whip.

We have problems with that printer. First–and I’ll admit that this is mainly my fault–all of the buttons on the front of the thing are labeled in French. I should have been careful to avoid the French model when I bought that printer at the office supply store in Gadsden, but I was blissfully unaware of the vast hordes of Frenchmen living in Etowah County, Alabama. I did not notice this curious anomaly until I got the thing home and hooked it up, by which time it seemed as though it would be less trouble to learn a few French terms than to take the printer back. Hey, "choix de photos," "taille des photos," "enrigester," and "outils," how hard could that be? Well, bear in mind that until I was in my early twenties, when I I read "hors d’oeuvres" I envisioned a team of prostitutes in a rowboat.

The second problem, with our prissy little French printer is that it is constantly disconnecting itself from our computer. Mind you, this is never anything as simple as a loose cord. No, this disconnection always happens deep in the bowels of the printer itself. Occasionally a little box will appear on our monitor asking if we want to reconnect the printer. We always tell the little box that YES, we do, but often the printer says NO, you don’t. Mostly, our monitor never tells us a thing about the printer at all. That is because our monitor is an English language version, and you know how the English feel about the French. So when this disconnection occurs without our knowledge and we attempt to print something, here’s what happens ...

Nothing.

And of course, being brain-impaired relics of a bygone era where, when something didn’t work the first time, you simply tried, tried again and again until either it finally worked or you broke it into small pieces, we tend to click on "print" over and over again. This is not wise, but then again, neither are we.

Sometimes, turning off the computer and turning it back on again will magically reconnect the printer. You would think we’d try that immediately, but it always takes us about fifteen minutes to remember. Just last week Marilyn found a photo of the train depot in her hometown of Mt. Clemens, Michigan on the Internet. She thought a copy of that photo would be nice, so she told our French printer to print one, which it refused to do. Not one to be intimidated by the French, she told it again. And again. And again and again and again.

"This dumb printer is acting up again," she said. I checked all of the cords snarled around the back of the computer system, and everything seemed to be connected to something or other. "Maybe it’s just that particular item," I said. I tried to print something else, and again, nothing. I rechecked the connections, and went to the basement, where I found my favorite computer tool, a large rubber mallet. No, I didn’t use it to take the printer apart–I’m not stupid. I just whacked the printer a few times, to make sure there was no gunk in the radiator, and all the bearings were spinning freely. Then I remembered the off/on drill, so I turned the computer off and back on again.

Unfortunately, when the connection was established, what the printer recognized was that apparently la femme ignora la mousse wanted not just a one-page photo of the Mt. Clemens depot, but all five of the pages concerning every detail of that stupid depot, multiplied by the dozens of times she’d clicked "print," plus nine or ten of the copies I’d attempted to make. Well, merci beaucoup, or beau bridges, or beau diddly, or whatever. Once it started spewing pages, we couldn’t stop it. It made no difference if I hit the "annuler" button, the "non" button, the "oui" button, or the "imprimer" button, it just kept spitting those copies out. If there had been a "surrender" button, that stinking little French printer might have understood, but there wasn’t one. So now we have several hundred photos of that depot, and lots of wasted ink and paper.

This massive regurgitation of printed material can occur within the hour, or even weeks later, when you least expect it. "You say you do not wish me to print fifty copies of that annoying forwarded e-mail your wife tried to print last month, Monsieur Le Pew? HA-HA, AU CONTRAIRE!" And sometimes, just because that printer is French, it will print several copies of something you never wanted, but it thinks you need anyway. Last month it gave me a 140-page biography of Jacques Cousteau, and added nine very snotty Journal Le Monde articles about Lance Armstrong and steroids.

Which brings me to another really stupid thing I did. I bought Marilyn a scanner for Christmas. No, it is not a police scanner. We have one of those, but have long ago forgotten how to program it, so all we get on the thing is weather information. And the weather information is not even Alabama weather information, it is Georgia weather information–another example of how inept we are with modern technology.

But anyway, the new scanner I got for her will hook up to the computer and allow her to scan documents, photos, slides and even negatives. It is very versatile. And here, a week after Christmas, that versatile scanner is still sitting on the floor near the computer, unconnected.

That is not because I am so technologically inept that I don’t know my hardware from my software, or because when anybody mentions my "desktop" I actually think they’re talking about the top of my desk, or even because I don’t know my USB port from a hole in the ground. While all of that may be true, it has never stopped me before. No, it is because on the side of the box, in small letters, right under "Photo Scanner," I spied the phrase "Scanneur de photos."

Marilyn thinks we can figure out how to operate the thing using the manual. But since the cover on that manual also reads "manuel de l’utilisateur" and "manual del usario," I think it might be best to just take the scanner back. If our French printer is any indication, I’m relatively sure that a multi-lingual scanner will be way more than we can handle.