Cash For Clunkers (Printer Edition)

Famous scene from the 1999 hit, "Office Space."

As many of you know, a few members of our group have been on a Quest For A Decent Printer. You know the drill...years ago, you were suckered into buying a cheap printer at Costco, because, well, it was cheap. And you've been paying for it in $40 ink cartridges and crappy, sideways-eaten paper jams ever since.

The cheap grad student in you won't allow you to throw out a printer that, okay, technically, sorta works.

But as Margaret, Tanya, and several others have noted, going into your dissertation, you're going to be printing a lot. So it's worth the investment to finally put the nail in the coffin and upgrade to a printer that doesn't make you homicidal.

The student loan checks for the fall semester will be released soon, so you might want to know about this deal:

Office Depot (location nearest to CGU is 2268 Foothill in La Verne, on the south side of Foothill near the Edwards movie theatre) is having a promotion where they'll take your crappy old printer - it doesn't matter what kind - and they'll recycle it for free and give you $50 towards a purchase of a HP printer. The promotion runs August 2nd through September 26th. Only certain HP purchases apply, there's a list on the website.

Traded in a much-despised Lexmark Z55 for a HP Officejet Pro 8500 (in its enormous box)

In addition, if you sign up as a teacher (adjuncting counts!) you get a 10% discount on top of the $50 off.

Price of the printer, minus automatic rebate, printer trade-in, and teacher discount

$50 for that hunk of junk ink-vampire that's cluttering up your desk and making your laptop announce "The printer is jammed" every five and a half seconds.

And they'll recycle it, so you won't have "I just gave a shitty printer to some poor sucker at Goodwill" on your conscience.

Who hasn't fantasized about dragging their printer out into a field and beating the living daylights out of it?