Inefficient Progress

I can think of so many ways that technology has made our lives easier and better. Then there are things that I call Inefficient Progress...

I was working on the invitations to my daughter's birthday party. I wish I could say that they're the awesome 3D hand-assembled kind, but they're not. They're the kind done with a printer. Not a 3D printer, either, but a regular old inkjet-type.

It took me hours to get these invitations done. Not the design, but printing them on odd sized paper. Back in the olden days of the 1990's, you could specify a custom paper size to the printer, and then the printer would fit your design to the page automatically. Done, and beautiful. Maybe printing a photo was grainy, but it always fit on the paper.

It's been years since I made invitations on the computer. My daughter chose a specific theme for her birthday, though, and she wanted to have invitations that were complementary. I agreed to make them, because back in the day, I was a wiz at doing invitations, and that was pre-Google! Sure enough, I found what I wanted, got the layout the way I wanted, and they looked pretty good. Then came the time to print them.

You see, we went to a craft store over the weekend, and we bought blank card stock with envelopes. Maybe if we would have gone to another store, I could have found half-fold cards with envelopes, but we were already at the store. Stop 2 of 3, and I didn't want to stretch it to stop 3 of 4. I was already hurting.

The card stock we bought is 5” x 6 ½” folded, meaning the paper size is 10” x 6 ½” for the printer. When I tell you I found NO templates for that size paper, I mean it. I looked at every site I could think of that had templates, blogs that claimed to have templates, asked on Facebook for ideas, looked for the manufacturer's website, and then finally stumbled on a site that listed the actual measurements for all the weird paper options. Weird, like the size I ended up telling the printer to use, was B5 (ISO), I think. It was pretty close once I found out what B5 (ISO) meant. It's 6.7” x 9.6” in case you were wondering.

So why would B5 be a size my printer understands, but it doesn't understand 5 x 6 ½? I was very frustrated, indeed. I was annoyed at not being able to put in a custom paper size, I was annoyed at having to learn what B5 (ISO) meant, and I was annoyed that I had very faint extra lines when it finally printed. It wasn't a whole lot of fun. Luckily for my family, I didn't really get into it until they were safely asleep, and they didn't have to deal with Frustrated Pollyanna. She ain't pretty. Or particularly nice.

Still, I'm fairly satisfied with the end result, and I acquired more accidental knowledge. It didn't, however, stop me from wishing I had a Time Lord to take me to the point in time when the invitations were finished.