Remember, way back when…before college, before high school, even, when every assignment and every test was expected to be hand-written.  Go on, take it in.  Smell the graphite and hear the “scritch scratch” of pencil hitting paper and creating all sorts of scribbles and curly-cued lines.  Of course, most took pride in this work, tedious as it was.  This, of course, was before technology was prevalent in both our minds and our daily lives.

  
This was before Spartan Print.

  
Ah, Spartan Print. Where would the majority of students be without you?  You with your printer queues and your login boxes and your little green triangle sitting happily in the taskbar; you made everyone happy once upon a time.

  
This was up until very recently, back in the days of Windows XP.  Spartan Print got along rather swimmingly with XP, and together they helped print thousands of copies of papers and exams and research projects.  Sure, there were a few problems, but everything has issues sometimes.

  
After a time, it became clear that the school needed an operating system upgrade, so everyone switched to Windows Vista.  It’s pretty, somewhat flashy, and amazingly easy to use, but it never has gotten along too well with Spartan Print.

  
From the get-go, Spartan Print fought tooth and nail with Vista, from printing when it felt like it, to not printing at all.  Back in the fall, there were times when documents were completely backed up.  Students could ask the printer to print, but the printer would just refuse.  It was more-or-less a battle of wills.

  
Finally, the kinks got worked out and things worked well…up until a couple of weeks ago when printers just weren’t printing the way they should have.  Quentin Moudy, tamer of Spartan Print, sent out an email saying that printers were down.  A few hours later he told us they were back up, and then told us that they were back down again.

  
I felt rather awful for a man in his situation, having to deal with hundreds of students and their printing needs, while technology had other ideas.  Like a father having to deal with unruly children, Moudy eventually managed to mostly straighten out the issue.

  
As far as I am aware, Spartan Print still has its ups and downs, but it is getting better.  I suppose I’ll chalk it up to “bugs in the system” or just technology being unreliable when it is needed most. 

Students, just be patient and know that your lovely printer queues are having some personal problems with the computer they’re talking to, and after they push and shove and talk it out, things will be happy once again.

  
Or you could go to the nearest store, shell out 75 dollars and print from your room instead.  Vista seems to like that setup.  Of course, you didn’t hear that from me.  I’m just reminiscing about graphite and paper, a technology that rarely failed.  Although, I really do love the smell of toner…

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