little inconsistencies or my time and sanity

Do you ever get so frustrated with something that you want to scream and throw or break things? Well that was me this weekend. The culprit? My Epson printer. In hindsight, I can't say that I'm all that surprised. I've only written about it's issues a few too many times.


This time I was trying to print the envelopes for our save the dates. When printing on the front side of the envelopes, the printer fed the paper with no problems. Printing our return address on the backside, though? Noooooooo. I was lucky if it would even feed one. The sound of the paper roller thingys spinning (yes, that's a technical term) and the three beeps alerting me to a paper jam will forever haunt my dreams. After relentlessly rearranging the paper in the tray for a few hours only to get less than ten envelopes to actually print, I decided it was time to come up with a better solution. Maybe the flaps of the envelope were the problem? So I broke out my handy dandy double sided tape to tape them all down. The printer printed four without jamming! Success!


Unfortunately it was short lived. Sometime around 9 or 10 I decided to break out my old college printer that was still collecting dust in my closet. It fed the envelope with no problem but the alignment of the return address was off and the text wasn't as saturated or as bold. So I went back to the Epson. I eventually had a bit of a rhythm going by printing each envelope one at a time. Then a new error message popped up and I was pretty sure the printer was done for good. At that point I gave up and went back to STD assembly while watching Dirty Dancing.


I tried again in the morning and the same error message was preventing me from printing a single thing. With further inspection, I found a small piece of plastic that had broken off from somewhere in the printer which must have been keeping the paper from feeding through. It was working again, but at this point my time and sanity were winning out over my need for perfection. So I crawled back to my old printer to finish everything off. I'm not thrilled with the outcome. I thought that I fixed the alignment issue, but one envelope would print with the text centered and the next would be left aligned. Oh well - at least they were feeding through! My choices were to let go or go crazy. Who's really going to look at the envelopes that closely anyway?? I'll just keep telling myself that...maybe it'll eventually sink in and make me feel better.

Unfortunately, it's hard to tell in my partially blurred out photo. The bottom was printed with my Epson - nice and bold, perfectly aligned. The top and middle were printed on my old printer. One would print centered, the next left aligned. Ughhh.

Any other perfectionists out there? Do you ever have to push your standards to the side in order to save your sanity?