Everyone knows about and has almost certainly experienced the effects of Murphy’s Law or to give it other name Sod’s Law. You know, the law that states that something will probably happen just when you least want it to and are the least prepared for it. I have often wondered whether Murphy was a wise man, or just someone to whom the effects of this law seemed to always apply, so much so that others named the law after him.

Anyhow, however it was named, it managed to strike our household last night. Picture the scene. It is the last night before my son has to hand in some GSCE coursework. He has completed his work, checked everything and all is ready. The only thing that remains is to print off his work for the final time, put into his school bag ready to take to school in the morning.

So what happens? Well of course one of the colour cartridges of our otherwise excellent home printer decides at that specific moment to run out. That is OK I think to myself, we have spares, but no, of course the colour required is not amongst our spare cartridges. It turns out that we had only recently replaced that colour, and it had run out again. Fortunately we have a large Hypermarket nearby that remains open to midnight, and I was able to make a quick trip and buy a replacement cartridge at the last minute.

This brings me to my main points. Firstly the cost of replacing printing ink cartridges seems way too high. OK so after my last post, perhaps now I am guilty of “stating the bleeding obvious”, but in this case I think it needs to be stated.  Another thing is that they don’t last long especially it seems certain colours. The cartridges themselves don’t seem to be very big, so one way to reduce costs might be to produce much bigger cartridges. This would reduce the cost of the cartridges themselves, which could be past on to us the consumer and make them last longer into the bargain.

Of course will the printer manufactures see this as a benefit to them? I doubt it, so perhaps we are stuck with high price printing. What do you think?