No, that’s not a line from “A Partridge in a Pear Tree”; it’s the current state of affairs. Not arrived at without some grief and anxiety, though. Yesterday we started using Cartridge World to get refilled toner cartridges for the two Brother HL-4070CDW color laser printers. That seemed like a good move to save money on toner. This morning, though, when one of the printers ran out of two colors and asked for more Cyan and Magenta, we hit a snag. We replaced the Cyan okay, but after replacing Magenta the printer still said it was out of that color. Had Cartridge World sold us a refilled cartridge that was empty? After some phone calls and a trip to the store we think that the store people just neglected to reset the “flag” on the toner cartridge that tells the printer the cartridge is full. The technician reset the flag, and said there is plenty of toner in the cartridge. He also showed us how to reset the flag ourselves in order to squeeze some extra life out of a cartridge.

Then we went to OfficeMax and bought 8 reams of their generic color laser paper, 28-pound weight. So we now have both printers printing, though one of them just quit in the middle of printing out a book, and left strange symbols on the edges of several pages. Another mystery to solve, or better yet, to ignore, reset the printer, and keep going.

I should say, though, that right now we have the largest single pile of printed books stacked up that we’ve had yet — 19 copies waiting to be cut, bound, and trimmed. So we should be able to finally build up a small inventory ahead of the next wave of demand, if any.