Chalk this one up as another recovered memory, ladies and gentlemen.

I was just watching something on my basic cable package which features of plethora of channels bereft of quality programming designed to inspire the highest levels of thought which your favorite blogger on the worldwide web requires in order to avoid wandering off to do something other than watch television.

The show involved pranks and their victims which had the unfortunate circumstance to be filmed in the act of reacting to shock and surprise in the most natural way the evolutionary gene pool has afforded them.

The particular prank littered show I was watching featured a person stretching clear colored cling wrap across the bottom of an open door.  After doing so, he intended to get his dogs to chase him through the door, where the pint sized pups would run face first into a wall of suffocating Saran Wrap.

Brilliant, huh?

Anyway, the would-be prankster ran through the door and tripped over the cling wrap.

Fun was had by all and proof reared it’s ugly head once again that Karma is a bitch.

Speaking of the fact that Karma is a bitch, let’s discuss my printer/scanner/fax machine.

Before I go off on this little tirade, it should be established that I don’t particularly subscribe to Karma, but for all tents and porpoises, I’m going to make a reference or two to it today just to get my point across.

That’s right.  I said “tents and porpoises”.

Today’s blog was intended to be a retelling of a story from my youth while growing up in central Wyoming.  December, 1978 brought Dad home from work one day with a box in hand.  In that box was an eight week old puppy borne of a Malamute.  He had been fathered by some sort of Chow or Husky, who had proven that he could jump a fence and knock the paws with the best of them.

Dad had taken the occasion of the dog’s potential breeding to name him Chowsky.

Anyway, I was going to go on and tell you a story about how my brother and I would taunt the dog by yelling his name in a falsetto voice in order to get him to chase us.  We would start upstairs, run downstairs and around the pool table.  We rarely made it all the way around the pool table before we were caught and hog tied by that dog that eventually grew to be about an 80 pounder.  Unfortunately, Chowsky was somewhat of an alpha dog, and chose to display that by grasping firmly to one leg of our Toughskins and proceeding to commit indiscriminant acts of dominance on us.  There was probably more than a time or two in which we grabbed an 8 ball off of the pool table and used it as a defensive tool so as to keep Chowsky from showing us who was boss.

The story was going to be reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting created to display the best of Americana.

It would have been nice.

The problem is that I wanted to include a picture of Chowsky to help move the story along.  Since the pictures I have of that dog were taken in 1978 when digital cameras hadn’t been integrated into the iPhone yet, it’s become necessary for me to scan a copy of the picture I have which was taken with a 110 camera.

Complaint department at HP, you’re on in 5, 4, 3,…..

Dear HP.

Whiskey.

Tango.

Foxtrot.

My wireless printer apparently can’t be seen by my laptop.

Well That’s Fantastic.

Even more brilliant, is the fact that the suggested fix for this particular ailment ranks up there with fashioning a wire coat hanger into a rhombus shaped apparatus and attaching it securely with duct tape to my router.

Seriously, HP?  Turn it off and on?  Unplug it for 60 seconds?  Make sure it’s facing the skies over Houston?  Reboot the Flux Capacitor?  Reinstall the software and the printer?  Wash, rinse, and repeat?

How about you people actually come up with a reason why my printer keeps losing it’s wireless connection and sending a patch?  That’s obviously more effective than partaking in some sort of OCD ritual like an NBA star shooting free throws, don’t you think?

Come on, HP.  Let’s get this one fixed.  You don’t want the web’s leading provider of verbal brilliance all ticked off about his inability to scan a 34 year old picture, do you?  Do you really want him to just take a picture of the picture with his phone and load that to this blog instead?  Because you know that’s what’s going to happen.

Thank you, HP, for ruining a perfectly good story about a leg humping dog.