Sorry for Printing - ePrint needs service

There’s something deceptive about ePrint.

Its malignance is the most dangerous kind, lurking just beneath the surface; it gets under our skin more than we know. The scant minutes before class are passing at an increasing rate, and there is a paper jam, abstruse error messages, an ink shortage, trays that are conspicuously empty—and all of these unlikely contingencies miraculously result by virtue of the fact that you have an essay due.

Take this situation and add up all the times it transpires throughout one day to countless individuals, and suddenly the presumed convenience of ePrint reveals itself as nothing more than a thin varnish obscuring a malignant evil. Like the finitude of our mortality, we all at some point succumb to this ultimate realization: some days, ePrint’s sole purpose in the world is to torment us.

Venomous evil? This is just ePrint, you say. It’s not that bad. In fact, it’s pretty useful half the time. To such a sentiment, I can only assume that you haven’t truly experienced ePrint. In a guile of false mercy, you have been spared thus far. Its malicious heart still has yet to single you out; the machines of Bostock and Perkins have not yet risen in union against you. Come that inevitable day when all your printing needs are denied by systematic ePrint failure and you will finally understand why some people legitimately fear the notion that artificial intelligence will eventually enslave the human race.

But what makes ePrint so demonic, so virulent? Especially given the fact that in the 10 percent of the time when you receive your prints on your first try at the first printer you come across it actually is ridiculously convenient.

Perhaps its deception is a function of its ubiquity. ePrint is embedded in our daily academic lives to the point of near invisibility. No longer can essays be submitted, readings be read or really anything at all be printed without a Net ID and a swipe of a Duke card. ePrint no longer represents a technological amenity created to help us, in the same way cell phones no longer encapsulate a revolution in communication, nor weigh 10 pounds, nor are even just phones anymore. In a sense, we’ve absorbed them; the fancy or delight we once took in the way they “simplified” our lives have vanished. And at some point in this transformation we have come to expect them to work at 100 percent efficiency, 100 percent of the time. As the reader, however, if you are suddenly fearful you have unwittingly immersed yourself in an anti-technology polemic disguised as an ePrint article, relax. Although ePrint is annoying and perhaps exemplary of our reliance on technology, I not unlike most people approach technology with a cautionary ambivalence, an approach I believe Thoreau was alluding to when he wrote in Walden, “Men have become the tool of their tools... but, I admit, the iPad is pretty cool.”