Months ago Dave and I bought a really nice Epson Workforce 600 printer; our intention for this machine was not only for business use (the copier and fax features are amazing) but to be the workhorse for our wedding invitations. We were promised by both Best Buy and online specifications of the model that this copy-scan-print-fax device was going to do the trick.
However, in preliminary testing here at home it failed miserably; while being fabulous for business use, it refused to run print on the heavy card stock we would be using for the invitations. Every time we set it to print something the rollers would spit out several pieces of paper before crying out that it was jammed up or otherwise needed to be turned off and left alone to sulk. Fabulous.
Feeling the crunch as of late to solve this problem and get the invitations prepped for mailing we looked at our options:
a. Take the Epson back to Best Buy and haggle for something that *would* actually work. This would be difficult seeing that we've had the printer for several months now. We love the Epson for everything else, so it stays.
b. Go to Kinkos. In my experience, Kinkos is really good at messing up print orders. . .not to mention the $1.00 page fee for color printing. Yikes. My stubborn theory is that I wanted to do the invitations myself, not trust them to any high schooler who would be working the counter that day.
c. Buy another printer. Sounds easy enough, right? Dave said that they have this cheap little HP printer at work they use for cardstock, and never have any problems.
So, I went on the hunt for the cheapest little printer I could find; bonus points if printing was all it did! My search landed Kirstin and I at Staples, where a man who worked there offered to run 110lb card stock through some of the cheapest printers they had. As we were getting discouraged, he remembered a Brother fax machine they had up front on clearance for $35.00.
Yes, $35.00. Half the price of the cheapest printer they had in stock. . .a fax machine that printed in color.
After confirming the 14 day return policy, the printer/fax came home with us. . .and believe it or not it worked without a hitch! Upon closer inspection, the print quality is just as good (if not better) that what the Epson was offering on the rare occasion we could get it to take a piece of card stock. The only caveat? It's very very slow to print - so we have to set it to print 20 sheets and walk away.
Now, the title of this post is 'Children for Dinner,' and for that I shall explain.
I have been meaning to reformat the RSVP cards for months now, never having been happy with the wording. Theresa cut the card stock to size while I made my edits (edits that were meant to make the card much less confusing, as well as some little things that my wonderful future Mother-in-Law pointed out) and in our haste to get started we never really proofread the new card. All 3 of us took a look at it, said 'looks great!' and set the fax machine to print 45 of them.
It took it just over 2 hours to finish the process, and only after we had started on another piece of the invitations did we realize the absolutely awful, yet hilarious mistake that I had made on the card.
We were offering children for dinner.
We were so excited to start printing and assemble the invitations that this was completely overlooked. In addition to fixing that, I'm going to change the date so it reads June 5, 2009 instead of June 5th, 2009, and will set the printer to have at it again.
On a better note, I have plenty of card stock leftover to re-make these, and as of yet our $35.00 lonely clearance printer is still not out of ink!
No comments:
Post a Comment