It was a bright December morning when I walked into chem, ready to listen to Ms. Baylis explain Unit 19. However, my day drastically took a turn for the worse. As I opened my laptop to print my notes, I heard the earth-shattering news: the Chrome printers were no longer supporting our laptops.
Anger rushed through my veins as I pulled out my notebook and pen, preparing myself to write notes for the first time this school year. I will never forget that chem class. The extreme hand cramps that stayed with me for the entire next week, the judgemental looks from my classmates who had their notes printed, and the overwhelming sense of self hatred I felt as I had to write each word from the presentation on the smartboard is something that I will never be able to move on from. This horrible reality was only magnified by the fact that there were only four of us in person that day.
The Chrome Uniflow printers have been an essential part of the Edgemont experience ever since they were installed. They have held our hands and nurtured us in the worst of times. They have been our only hope in a world full of overly competitive AP students, and they have been the only thing keeping my grades afloat, as I print the notes a minute before class starts. Never again will I experience the librarians screaming at me as I wait for my ID to be accepted by the printer at 8:39, already one minute late for first period.
I never thought I would miss the weird printers and their weird scanning obsession that made us verify our ID cards before we could print APUSH papers that were actually due the day before. Never again will I be able to escape the gusts of freezing wind that funnel through the open windows of classrooms to print out the notes for a class that started half an hour ago. And for all of this, I am truly saddened.
Unfortunately, my experience is not unique. At 12:00 AM on January first, as clocks were striking midnight, and the world was celebrating the new year, the most scandalous atrocity since the beginning of 2020 occured. Chrome printers across the world betrayed their owners and users, and have not printed a single sheet of paper for us since.
Although we should be recognized for surviving such a traumatic event, some people have had to suffer an even worse fate. Connor Gerraughty, an otherwise joyful 2016 graduate of Seely Place, enjoying his youth while it lasts, was devastated by this scandal because even his home printer was one of the malicious, laptop-unsupporting, cold-blooded Chrome printers.
He is known to many as a happy, young boy, but this event has changed him for the worse. “I no longer have a safe place to print my weekly sudoku puzzles,” he said in an exclusive interview. “It wasn’t just the school printers which lulled me into a false sense of security, even my own home printer delivered such malice into my otherwise peaceful life. I had no choice but to dispatch it from its duties and replace it with a new model.” Now, after barely escaping this printer fiasco with his social-emotional learning skills intact, Connor has resorted to building toothpick models of Lincoln’s childhood home, and he is no longer the ray of sunshine he used to be.
If one good thing has come from this scandal, it is that we now have learned that we cannot rely on the prolonged seven minute break between classes to print the notes we forgot to print the night before. Although the event has been truly scarring, I have determined to never be caught walking into chem without a set of notes printed from the night before, and I am sure many of you have learned the same lesson. In 2020, we learned how to survive a global pandemic. This year, our biggest challenge will be to learn to survive without our most trusted emotional support systems: the Chrome Uniflow printers.