If you were to take a few seconds to read its status display, you might conclude that the colour laser printer I use has been through a warl. For atleast one week, it’s been reporting that its cyan, magenta and yellow toner cartridges are all completely empty. Yet I keep printing. I hammer the little sucker with print job after print job and when it protests—by going offline in the middle of a run and asking to be fed with new toner—I just remove, shake and return its supposedly empty cartridge and force it spit out what I want. The machine keeps sinking to new levels of desperation—now asking me to order a replacement for its black image drum—and the weird part about all of it is that this printer torture thrills me.

When it comes to consumables for electronics, I’m a miser. In fact, due to my diligence with rewritable CDs, I have yet to use more than 8 of the 100 blank CD’s I bought a year ago. But with this printer in particular, I’m just gratuitously cruel. The sad part is that I don’t even think that cost per page savings is what motivates me. I watch it’s increasingly pathetic refrain of “Y Toner Empty… M Toner Empty… C Toner Empty… Order Black Image Drum” with glee. This is not similar to ‘putting a car thorugh its paces’, but rather more like taking a nice BMW and driving it into the ground as a taxi just because you can.

At the end of this ordeal—when the printer finally begins to spit out prints with fire engine red that appears to be merely off-white—I will likely have saved a few dollars. But the truth is that I would probably have paid to force the abused machine to eke out every ‘bonus’ page after its first unwitting ‘toner empty’ report.

It’s a sickness really. I need help.