Lesson Learned

I recently volunteered to edit a friend’s novel.  I love doing this and it is one thing that I am particularly good at.  I was looking forward to reading it through a couple of times before beginning my editing.  She emailed that it was about 150 pages.  No problem. 

I have difficulty reading on the computer screen so I always have to have a hard copy.  I planned on printing it out.  As some of you may know, I recently moved and am still in the boxes and boxes stage.  I knew I had printer paper but I couldn’t find it in the boxes.  I don’t go into town very often so I didn’t buy any right away.  Last night I hit the jackpot and found a box with nothing but paper in it.  I opened the document and reformatted it to be double spaced instead of 1.5 as it’s much easier to read and to make comments in between the lines.  This mostly worked except between paragraphs where she had triple spaced and when I reformatted, it gave me six lines of spacing so I had to go through and reformat the space between paragraphs.  By the time I finished, the document was now 212 pages.  No problem.  I figured I would print it and in a little while I would be reading the novel.

Wrong.

A few days ago I was printing some pictures to make magnets for my refrigerator.  I had the printer settings to BEST QUALITY.  I forgot to change it before I hit PRINT.  That meant that the document is printing VERY, VERY slowly.  It has been printing for the better part of TEN HOURS.  And because it was set on color printing, it has used all of my color cartridge.  And, this printer prints from the last page of the job forward which means I can’t even start reading it til it’s all done.  Right now it’s on page 25.  So in a while I’ll be able to start reading from page one. 

Except…

There is hardly any ink left and it is now printing a very light shade of purple.  By the time it gets to the first page, I may not be able to read it at all.

I guess I’m going to have to go into town and look for ink.  At least I’ll have some good reading material to settle in with.  Thanks to Netflix, I have no movies to watch so I will be reading instead.

Next time, before I hit PRINT, I will check the settings and make sure it’s not on BEST  QUALITY or on COLOR!