I saw a list circulating today of supposedly ridiculous startup pitches. Renting out your forehead to carry solar panels. Robot mosquitoes collecting blood donations. People were chuckling in the comments about how absurd human imagination gets when sleep deprivation sets in.
Honestly, none of it sounds any weirder than what printer companies pull in broad daylight.
Think about it for a second. If you walked into an office thirty years ago and told the secretary that her desktop machine would lock up and refuse to scan a black-and-white invoice because it ran out of yellow dye, she would have handed you an aspirin. She’d think you were having a spell.
Or microchipping little plastic reservoirs of liquid so the machine throws an electronic tantrum if you buy the generic brand at the grocery store. That sounds like a gag from a Sunday comic strip. Yet here we are. I pay an actual monthly fee to let a plastic box sit on my corner table, silently auditing its own fluid levels over my home Wi-Fi like an ICU patient. If my credit card on file expires, it simply stops putting letters on paper. That isn’t a late-night joke on the internet. That is just ordinary Tuesday maintenance for office hardware.
So when an entrepreneur pitches floating data centers or transparent potato chip bags, I don’t scoff. The bar for what passes as a viable business model was lowered into the basement the day someone convinced the board of directors that ink cartridges ought to have expiration dates.
Next thing you know, the manufacturer will offer me fifty cents off paper if I agree to let them project advertisements onto my wall while the print heads spend twenty minutes clanking back and forth. Actually, I shouldn’t give them ideas.
What is the most absurd piece of logic your home printer has ever tried to enforce on you?
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Originally published on Substack.
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