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 