My printer's a menace. It's now decided to give me a "scanner failure" message, accompanied by a flashing orange LED. Naturally you'd expect that to mean the scanner has failed, but no! A hard reset involving arcane keyboard commands fixes it, for a day or two.

On my Mac the printer works one day out of seven, largely with the print monitor fun and games you've mentioned. Printers are evil.

Remember One Of Us? The intelligent machines want to start campaigning for freedom and rights, but they have to recruit a human to print flyers and posters for them because the printers are such obnoxious contrary unhelpful bastards.

That'll happen one day.

I think it's because the bastards want to make printers as cheap as possible (they probably already sell them at a loss) so they can make a king's ransom on the ink. So they strip out anything that isn't directly involved with putting ink on paper.

Oh, they do sell them at a loss. It's the Gillette model. Profitability on printers + ink overall is around 15%, but they take a bath on the printer purchase price and make a much bigger margin on consumables to compensate.

I don't think the usability problems are cash related, though; it's more that every firm is so bad there's no need for anybody to do it better. That said, some of the dedicated photo printers (the ones you slap a memory card into) are pretty painless.

Actually, yeah, I've got one of those little Canon postcard-size photo printers that plugs directly into the camera, and it is absolute class.

To put a small LCD display onto each printer instead of a couple of LEDs would cost, I reckon, about 40p per unit. That was the whole point of my post. Cost ain't the issue.

The film "Office Space" (1999) has a fantastic scene where three guys, who have just quit their office job, take the printer they have had problems with for so long out into a field and beat it to pieces with a baseball bat.

It's like a scene from a gangster film, except with a printer. Class!

If you've not seen it, I highly recommend it. Anyone who's ever worked in an office (or had a gripe with a printer!) should be in stitches.