The end of an era…..

Well, it’s my sad duty to report that it’s the end of an era. I’m heartbroken to report that my little HP laserjet 1010 printer has died after years of dedicated motorsport service.

It was one of the first “home office” laser printers. I bought it in about 2008 for home for about 200 quid. It quickly got pressed into service printing night navigation paperwork. It started off nice and gentle printing “master” copies that we got photocopied.

That was going well until one night a few days before an event when we had “borrowed” a kind sponsors office to print and collate the paperwork. This involved printing all the master cards, time cards, plots, instructions, etc. Basically any piece of paper that was to be used in the event. Then the inevitable happened. The VERY expensive office printer/photocopier died due to all the work we were asking it to do. I had the little HP1010 and the laptop brought along to print master copies. That little printer was urgently pressed into service and I printer paper for about 4 hours straight, along with a lot of card stock for time cards. There was one VERY worried COC and one pissed off event secretary as the fancy printer had automatic collating and stapling. That all had to be done by hand.

From that year on, that little printer then printed a lot of the the night nav stuff for years, chugging away merrily. All was well in the garden, even if it ran a little hot at times….

Oh it as suffered over the years of printing reams of card stock in one go. The rollers were a little picky and worn, it smoked the odd time a tad and it smelt funny if asked to print more than 100 pages in one go. But it soldiered on.

The end came recently when I asked it to print some Acts of the Oireachtas. That was the final straw and the smoke it generated was a bit more than usual. I mean, a LOT of smoke. Alas, it prints no more after being unceremoniously dumped.

I replaced it with a Canon Megatank.