There’s something about getting into your 40s that makes you more honest with yourself and others. So when my husband asked me last year if there was anything I’d like for our wedding anniversary, I gave him a straight answer: a printer.
Or to be more specific: a printer that works. I know it doesn’t sound romantic, but I’m in my Marie Kondo/spring-cleaning era. If it doesn’t spark joy, it goes in the bin. If it’s necessary to wellbeing, it gets bought. Flowers are nice, but a working printer delivered by a life partner who has researched all the crummy models and found the one in a million that spits out pages on demand? Come on, that’s love.
For 2026, I have small goals: join a club, regain muscle mass (Hi, perimenopause), meet more friends for coffee, and own a printer that doesn’t gaslight me.
Apparently I’m on trend: gifts for a fourth wedding anniversary? Tradition says it’s fruit or flowers. But for a modern present? It’s appliances, believe it or not.
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The last time I bought a printer, I strode into my local electrical store and thought I’d treat myself to a fantastic printer that could do all sorts. This printer had every bell and whistle (it could print, scan, photocopy, yodel, do trigonometry). I flung money at it with gleeful abandon without even thinking to do a basic Google search.
It was mere days before a “paper jam” (there was no paper in it) meant it died forever. Never raw-dog the printer purchasing experience. Only a printer can promise so little, and deliver even less. The more urgent a need is – a boarding pass, a presentation, a shipping form for the dress you bought 27 days ago – the less likely a printer is to spring into life. “It’s my age,” my mother said recently, lamenting her misbehaving printer, which had decided to print 800 pages of &!I*& gobbledegook. It’s not, I said, soaking up the only real pleasure one can take from a printer: giving out yards about it.
In the community WhatsApp group I’m a member of in Dublin, which is absolutely not a printer support group, stories of people trying to help their parents set up printers over the phone abound. “I’m about to lose my mind,” wrote one woman despairingly. In our family WhatsApp, we know who has a working printer at any given time; we’ve organised express get-togethers around it. In any office I’ve worked in, there’s always a savant who can work the printer and is correctly revered. “Ask Catherine,” they say. “She knows how to manage it.”
Maybe I shouldn’t lean on the printed word so much for comfort. But I can’t be the only person who’s seen a sweating best man give a wedding speech with a phone in his hand that keeps locking, and thought: you needed an inkjet. Same for the person creeping around the office trying to print their salary details on the giant communal printer for a mortgage application. Ryanair may have given up on boarding passes but bureaucracy, from banking to insurance, continues to insist on forms signed by hand.
There’s a lot of talk right now about the sandwich generation – women and men in their 40s and 50s who have small children, elderly parents, busy jobs and big mortgages and are leapfrogging from one minor crisis to the next, whether in childcare, homecare or just arguing over who should take the pile of clean clothes from the bottom of the stairs to the top. I’m in that squeezed generation, also known as the lucky ones. We’ve a house, jobs, our IVF was successful, our three-year-old is doing great, and still there are times when it all seems too much.
Printers exist to make a mockery of any notion we might have of ourselves as sophisticated beings winning at life. We have our plastic bags in a bag in the kitchen cupboard, we know what it means to hygge a house, we take off our shoes as soon as we enter a hallway. We junk journal, hug giant water bottles to our chests as emotional support, post pictures of our 2016 selves on Instagram, debate the Wuthering Heights rejig, make jokes about AI, and the endless rain. They’re all just forms of coping, really.
You could be washing the dishes, filling out school forms, hitting all the bases like you’re in a perpetual game of rounders. Then along comes the printer, to make you feel like an idiot, screaming into the void. The printer is a tipping point: here to tell you you’ve failed at life. Don’t let it.
For the record, my husband arrived home back in May with a HP OfficeJet 250 All-in-One. Nine months later, it’s still working. Glory be. I’m glad I ditched the flowers. I’ll take my love token in the form of a working printer.
