Recently, there was a lull in my workload at The Grind. Since my ambition is a bottomless pit or possibly it’s just a pit, or maybe it’s more accurately described as a rut, but who am I kidding, it’s none of the above. I have no ambition whatsoever outside of a fondness for staring enviously at the pigeons roosting on the sill outside my window.
Let's trade places. You write this blog.
As it so happened there was a free moment in my schedule. Truthfully my work-life has been a barren plain the entirety of this month, if not every day in the 2012 calendar year and I’m shedding brain cells faster than my final vestiges of fertility. So there was an opening as wide as the sky in my day and I seized — to be honest here, I never seize, I’m inclined to drag myself, bitching and moaning loudly to give the impression that I’m accomplishing something arduous that merits my salary of a potato and health insurance. Anyway, I used this wide-open-as-a-$10-hooker’s-thighs-moment to exploit the opportunity to research setting the time on the office fax machine from the hour in Guam to the precise minute in Gotham City.
That statement motivated me to Google the time difference between New York City and Guam. I’ve discovered that Guam is actually fourteen hours ahead of New York. Our fax machine is two hours behind EDT.
It turns out that the time on our fax machine is set perfectly for Scottsbluff, Nebraska.
Proving that point.
For a moment I consider weaseling out of my self-imposed mission by suggesting to my boss, Elsbeth, that we simply relocate our office to Scottsbluff, but even I have the capacity to realize that idea is utterly inane. Instead, I consider proposing to my superior an alternative solution – we sell our fax machine to someone in Scottsbluff and we get ourselves a new one. Yet, it occurs to me that setting up a new one would likely fall under my jurisdiction a.k.a., Perform Each and Every Thankless Task the Mentally Efficient Avoid. I realize I feel like setting up a new fax machine even less than resetting the clock on the current one. Since there is no rest for the bleary I have to figure out how to reset that clock.
I Google: how do i set the clock on the canon cfx-l4000?
Google takes me to a site called FixYa. Back on November 7, 2007, someone named 1jennylyn asked the exact same question as me.
Approximately six weeks later, a dude named Rob F responds:
“There’s a button marked “Data Registration” in blue. This color means you 1st have to press the function button to make it work. Do this and scroll using the left right up down arrow keys till you find, date and time reg. Then follow your nose.”
I think:
Me: Huh?
If my nose could talk, it’s screaming:
My Nose: Leave me the hell out of this!
Did I mention that Rob F shared this solution on Christmas Day? I suspect he wrote it clad in his underwear and lacks the Will This Make Me Look Like a Loser gene.
Since Rob F’s answer earned Best Solution and I could not find what other solutions he was competing against, even though my personal go-to remedy is one I call Shut It Off, Pull Out the Plug, Eat Something and Then Go Back to It, instinct tells me that will not work in the case of setting the time, so I decide to give his obtuse solution a shot. Predictably, my nose fails me and I am a baffled button pushing cursing doofus.
Better name of site ConfuseYa.
My colleague, (not) Under Ling (anymore) notices that I’m hovering over the fax machine in fury. I return to my desk to Google another source of solution. Unaware that I’m in the process of losing even more of the little that remains of my mind, she approaches the fax machine.
(not) Under Ling (anymore): Hey, is there something wrong with the fax machine?
I suspect she’s itching to push some buttons, too. I morph into Charles Manson and growl:
Me: Don’t touch anything!
Hand's off or I'll shoot you.
I find a forum on another site called Fix Your Own Printer. A first responder named Sharpie is my hero. This person has a different model of fax machine, the L4500, but he or she thinks that setting the time works the same on both units and writes a description about how to do this in such lucid English for Easily Frustrated Morons I would like to award this person a Nobel.
We're not on Scottsbluff time anymore (but God help my nose when Eastern Standard Time returns)!
Lame Adventures 
Nothing could motivate me to tackle a problem like this–unless, perhaps, it’s a really great piece of chocolate cake. Otherwise, I remain in Scottsbluff time.
Congrats on the successful reset!
Hugs,
Kathy
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Thanks Kathy! There might actually be a part 2 to this post. Even though our clock’s time is now perfect a feed roller appears to have bought its rainbow so now we’re back in fax machine limboland. The repair probably requires a $2 replacement part, but this time I’ll let the Gods from Canon deal with this headache so I’ve resumed pigeon-watching.
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Somewhat off-topic for copiers, but speaking to your windowsill pigeons…
A few days ago I noticed a repetitive but novel and unidentified sound in my house. I listened for a bit and could NOT figure out what could possibly be producing it.
I followed my ears (much better than my nose for such a task) and eventually found it was being caused in an upstairs room by an outdoors robin.
I live in a “piano-key rowhouse” where part of the house is hollowed out on one side with windows facing the neighbors’ windows about six feet away on the other side. For some unknown reason a robin was continually flying back and forth bashing its head on the two windows in turn, with momentary fluttering/hovering efforts at perching on nonexistent windowsills. The sounds were the more distant sound of it hitting the neighbor’s window and then the more pronounced sound of it hitting my window.
It’s possible it was seeing its reflection and trying to join it, or it’s possible that its brain was just wired to fly backwards whenever it hit an unknown obstacle that it couldn’t see. But for whatever reason, it must have banged its head like that a hundred times before I discovered it. I rapidly moved to open the window and evidently my appearance startled it out of its cycle and it disappeared — hopefully with nothing more than injured pride.
🙂
Michael
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I love this story Michael! That’s a Lame Adventures robin! Thanks for sharing!
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Your fax machine repair reminds me of the $15 build-it-yourself bookcase my daughter and I bought at Walmart the other day. We sat there in the middle of the living room floor with boards, piles of little screws and nails all around us and an instruction sheet of drawings only, no text, clearly missing the step 1 1/2. Then a friend called. She had recently restored the historic building she bought, almost single-handedly, with a little help from her dad. “Do you mind if I come over?” she said. “Not at all! Come now, quickly.” She laid everything out in order, then I hammered and screwed everything together with the hammer and screwdriver from the toolbox my stepfather gave my mother when they got divorced in their 70s.
After assembling the bookcase, we rewarded ourselves with crackers, gourmet cheeses, gallons of wine and great conversation.
Upon drinking some wine, we also noted, via my daughter’s iPhone photos, that she is much better, with the help of my two granddaughters, at arranging “Pole Barbies”, utilizing the girls’ Barbie collection, in provocative positions around and among their staircase spindles and along the upstairs banister.
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I don’t know were to begin responding to this comment, Samantha, because now I cannot get images of pole-dancing Barbie out of my mind! Mattel should market that version — it would be a million seller! I also have a craving for crackers, gourmet cheeses (just goat and sheep’s millk – I’m ferociously lactose intolerant), gallons of wine and great conversation. Always cool to hear from you!
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I know. My comment was a lot to digest. But, my mother passed on April 11. So, it is a joy that she is released from her long suffering from dementia. The wine and cheese and tons of other food — I’m going on a diet as soon as I finish gobbling it all up — were delivered by caring friends. I’d email you some if I could — or fax it, albeit my fax machine is, at this stage, akin to one unearthed in an archeological dig (iFrugal me). Maybe Apple and Adobe can come up with a solution to this dilemma. But, I agree, once you have a Mac you can’t go back — and as old as it is, I may as well call it an iFrugal. I love mine, though. All this to say, due to my present circumstances I highly appreciated you well-written fax story and your wit, helping to boost my spirits. Thanks. 🙂
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I’m glad you’re hanging in there following all you went through and what you’re feeling now. I’m also glad that the inanity going on here at LA continues to entertain you.
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Also, I just checked my blog. Thank you for your very kind words and heartfelt thoughts — actually pretty close to my own.
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Sorry to hear of your loss. My 81 year old mom has just started down the same path as that of your mom. I cannot imagine the strength it took to walk that journey with her.
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I wish you and your mom well, Mike. It IS a very long journey. Fortunately, in the last year or so (out of nearly a decade) we had extraordinary help and amazingly supportive, compassionate friends, including this LameAdventures person to brighten my spirits and help me to keep laughing. Thanks.
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My admiration for you has increased triple-fold. I despise the fax machine and always have. Will barely go near it unless I absolutely must. Yet, you, dauntless, you, dove right in and handled it like no butt-crack showing technician ever would. Might I please borrow you once in a while to do my faxing for me?
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If I can ever figure out how to email myself to Idaho, I’ll do all your faxing for you, pal!
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Certainly The Lamest of Adventures I’ve read this year. Bravo. You have captured the existential funk of the post-industrial information-driven society so aptly “personified” by the fax machine. Your next mission is to synch Microsoft Outlook and the Blackberry. Maybe then you can iron out the conundrum facing Mac users with Adobe attachments.
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🙂 🙂
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I have a feeling that you’re all too familiar with that conundrum, Mike, but although I am a Mac user of a dozen years (“once you have Mac you can’t go back”), I’ve yet to have an iPhone or iPad or any of the popular smart technologies sweeping the world, but eluding me. I’m iFrugal because I live within my very modest means.
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I am using an iPad but am more tech illiterate than you’d expect. I actually trend toaward the Luddite. My wife tells me Apple and Adobe have been in a pissing match for years. How a fruit urinates is lost on me, however.
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I think Apple would win that match since fruit are primarily water unlike brick.
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Quite right. Maybe that’s why apple juice looks like it does. You are a wise woman!
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Me, wise? That’s a first!
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I got so tired of fax machines that I don’t fax anymore. Instead I bought a scanner and email pdfs. It’s much easier. My lame adventure today was buying spikes to keep the pigeons off my window sill and hooking a few CDs on them. I used to ignore the pigeons but they’ve started using my sill for their bathroom.
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Hey, pigeons are the classic “dirty birds” and have a reputation to maintain! Thanks for visiting and taking the time to comment.
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