Think and You Shall Receive--the Kurbside Kmart Comes Through Again

Look what appeared on the curb across the street the other day--a nearly new and entirely functional Canon MX 922 printer. How convenient, seeing as I had meant to head out to Route 1 two days before to buy a new one, but had gotten sidetracked.

One by one, our printers had failed over the past six months. An old HP flashed some sad excuse or other on its screen. A Canon outright lied, pretending to have a paper jam when clearly no paper was jammed at all. An internet search, which usually brings up some wisdom about how to repair stuff, gave only a mocking suggestion to turn off, unplug, then plug in and turn back on, to be repeated ad nauseam. Then my wife's fancy Lexmark laser printer, nearly new, suddenly claimed it was missing a thingamajig. This, too, was a baldfaced lie--probably some sensor that had lost its sense. Support said to extract the "missing" part from the printer's innards, then put it back in. Three times I did this, turned the printer back on and, voila, the same error message. Useless printers were beginning to accumulate like dysfunctional pens that, for some reason, are so hard to give up on.

In the past, before religion became so politically charged, one would call the appearance of a nearly new, functional printer on the curb a Godsend, without any implication as to one's personal beliefs. It was just part of the language. Perhaps a tenant in the rental across the street was moving out and couldn't take the printer along. Or perhaps they found an annoying glitch in the printer's performance that we have yet to notice. In any case, it was nice of them to put the printer out after the overnight rain rather than before.

I'd like to think that the exasperating attempts to fix the other printers were a necessary prelude to finding the printer on the curb, that fruitless effort eventually bears fruit. Hard to prove. This would be akin to curbside Kharma, in which reward for earnest effort is oblique rather than direct. Going out in search of a printer on the curbs of Princeton would have surely gained nothing. The key to shopping at the Kurbside Kmart is to never actually go looking for anything. Call it serendipity, which works like ideas or insights bubbling up out of the unconscious mind. Its gifts always come by surprise.