120 volts of pain

Welcome, shocked reader, and do not be alarmed: I haven't connected live wires to my body. But today I wanted to cover something that's notably different here in the US, and the unexpected pain it's caused me as an expat.

A lifetime of playing with vintage valve amplifiers means I've had my fair share of shocks from mains electricity, and that has made me something of a stickler for electrical safety. The UK mains plug is a work of art - it's hopelessly over-engineered, but as a result is actually incredibly safe. The American plug that you see above has notably fewer safety features, and certainly for the first few months of our tenure here you could often catch me complaining about them. This was before I discovered Conway Electric, manufacturers of the work of art you see above, but I digress.

It's not the simple difference in the plug that causes you pain as an expat; you get used to it, and mains electricity here is just fine. But it is different: 120v and 60Hz, instead of the friendly 230v and 50Hz we're familiar with in Europe. Practically speaking, this means we left most of our AC appliances in storage in the UK, with the intention of buying new items here. Of course, computers, phones etc all run on DC and are fine to use on both sides of the pond.

And mostly this has been fine, if a little expensive: I've bought myself a much nicer bean-to-cup espresso machine here, and I invested in a decent guitar amp. We'll probably bring these items back to the UK and get some transformers so we can continue to use them once we return. However, something I tried to resist buying was a printer. We had a perfectly reasonable printer in the UK, a device I'd rate as 'mildly annoying', which is about as good as a printer gets these days: the last printer I'd give a better rating would be the Laserjet III, a classic of the genre, but now 30 years old. Printers are an item that nobody likes, and are optimised for cost. Printers are cheap, flimsy and inherently mechanical devices that try to bridge between our virtual world and the physical one, which is a mistake if ever I heard one.

So here's our American printer, which really can't claim to scale the giddy heights of 'mildly annoying':

One of these devices I hate. The other two are made by Apple.

This thing is just designed to annoy me.

Firstly, it's philosophically misaligned with my outlook on life. It's determined to have a mediocre stab at being each of a scanner, a photocopier and a printer rather than doing one of these jobs well. In doing so it's attempting a Canute-like holding back of the technological tide: clearly no-one at HP got the memo that mobile phones have pretty awesome cameras on them now, so as a result domestic scanners and photocopiers are entirely obsolete. The need to shoehorn these three functions into a control array that includes 8 buttons, one rocker button, and a 16-character display means it's virtually impossible to use. Built to a price, and the price is your happiness ;-).

Secondly, it has an illuminated button on it. The button flashes. Dear reader, I have searched and researched, and there is literally no way to stop this button flashing continually. For 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the flashing white light of this button reminds me of how poorly thought through this device is. I've tried to empathize, I really have, but I cannot conceive of why the product was built like this.

Thirdly, if I concentrate on the one job this printer actually has, which is turning virtual documents into physical ones, well, it's pretty rubbish at that too. There's a less than 50% chance that if you print to this device, the thing you printed actually appears. What's more than 50% likely is that instead, the printer prints pages and pages of incomprehensible control codes. Just to increase the general annoyance level, it's also reasonably likely to jam part way through doing this. Don't get me started on whether the print quality is even any good once you're lucky enough to get it to produce the document you wanted (hint: the print quality isn't any good).

And reader, this all happened because the US doesn't have the same electrical supply voltage as the UK.

At this point, despite the link to Palo Alto, I've had it with HP seducing me with their track-record of producing really quite good printers that I remember from 30 years ago; I'll probably buy a Brother, then ritually beat this one into tiny pieces in scenes reminiscent of Basil Fawlty's relationship with his Austin 1100 estate. Or more likely, stick it on Nextdoor for the next victim to enjoy.

But let's end it on a high note, and be grateful for the miracles of modern electrical appliances: my coffee machine is incredibly good, and I couldn't have survived a year of work-from-home without it; I've got some really nice KEF all-in-one speaker/amp/hifi units that sound lovely; the Apple Homepod you can see on top of the printer is a fantastic device; the standing desk I mentioned a few posts ago is tremendous. I think we're going to have quite a few 230-to-120 transformers hanging around for a few years to come when we get back to the UK!