After a year of having the wonderful Presto email-printer service at my Mother's apartment, I am finally forced to admit defeat.

Rats.

One thing you eventually learn is that you can not jolly some people along to accept or make use of some things. My mother likes the idea of getting emails on the printer, but as each slight little thing goes wrong, she simply refuses to learn how to deal with it.

The real problem is that I am 3000 miles away, so I can't drop by to put paper in, change the ink, plug it back into the wall, or explain to her what some bit of arcana on the printout means or doesn't mean.

So the printer has been sitting on her floor unplugged for the past two months. Worse, I can't get my several brothers and sister who live in the area and visit her regularly to pay attention to the machine either.

The problems couldn't be more trivial. Putting in paper. Checking the printouts. And when my Uncle Hugh sends his sister one of his forwarded email jokes, it produces page after page of forwarded addresses before it gets to the joke. Big deal; but it makes my mother think the thing is not worth reading. And of course no power on earth can get Uncle Hughie to figure out how to remove the unnecessary Forwarding info.  

It's so depressing. Presto is a wonderful solution. But when the end link the chain--the user--won't fill the paper tray, and I'm not there to do it for her -- even the Wonderful is Useless.

Now what do I do with the printer???

Bummed,

mac mccarthy