Published on November 1, 2025 9:37 PM GMT

Last time I printed a document, I wrote down the whole process:

• Open settings and look at list of printers; David tells me which printer I should use.
• Go to print dialogue; don’t see the relevant printer.
• Go back to settings and hit buttons which sound vaguely like they’ll add/install something.
• Go back to print dialogue, realize the printer I wanted had probably been there already and I hadn’t been looking in the right place.
• Hit print button.
• David brings me to where the printer was a few days ago. It is not there.
• Ask Lauren where it is. It’s in room 1A1.
• Briefly go the wrong direction because we’re not sure where that room is.
• Find the room, and the printer. A stack of things has printed, including two pages of my thing. The printer is out of paper.
• Go look in the basement where the printer paper was a few days ago.
• … that has also moved.
• Follow Alina to the new location of the paper.
• Spend a minute looking for the paper in that room before finding it.
• Bring back the paper. Person in the room with printer has already found more paper somehow else and reloaded it. My document has printed.
• … except that page 1 did not print, there’s just a blank page of paper at the front and everything else printed fine.
• Walk back to office; try to print just page 1. Walk back to printer and receive another blank sheet of paper.
• Walk back to office; open document in firefox. Walk back to printer; receive page 1 successfully.

Note that I’ve had this post in mind for a while now and so decided pretty early on to write down the steps; I don’t think this experience is very cherry-picked. On a gut level, this level of crap is basically what I normally expect when attempting to print something.

What’s up with this? Why is printing so bad?

It feels to me like there’s some kind of simple underlying principle to be understood here, a principle of when and why and how this kind of friction shows up in day-to-day life and what specifically it looks like. And it whatever that principle is, it feels like it’s one of the central drivers of our world, on a similar level to things in the Gears Which Turn The World posts or Worlds Where Iterative Design Fails or The Expert. It feels like a core thing to understand, if one wants to Get Shit Done to a far greater extent than is currently possible.

Printing is a particularly convenient use-case to focus on because the misery of printers is already a meme; people joke about it frequently. Often this kind of friction seems antimemetic and hard to legibly point at, so it’s useful to already have a spotlight on it. And of course, I’m skeptical of principles people present which don’t come from looking at some real-world examples and figuring out what unifies them; thus the importance of having a common everyday phenomenon (like printing) to look at in order to back out the principle.

So, the question: what do you notice, when you look for patterns in your own miserable printing experiences? What are the exact boundaries of this phenomenon? What underlying principle might drive it?  When and how precisely will the drivers of bad printing generalize to the rest of our world?

Why is printing so bad?