In Fond Memory of Simpu

Everyone has heard of stuff like "Change is good" and "Moving on" and "Letting go". We all have to deal with changes, with stuff that moves out of our lives, with stuff that moves in. We have to let go at times, and make space for things that are new and not entirely comfortable. I write this, just after we have had our faithful printer-scanner-fax device of eight months replaced by an all new printer-scanner-fax-email device.

Funny it may seem, but we at office were all pretty attached to the demure HP Laserjet 3055. My colleague had christened it "Simpu Singh Sisodia", "simpu" for short. Simpu had a simple philosophy, it responded to love and care. If you wanted prints, you looked at it with love, gave it a little pat and told it to print. Same with scanning and copying. Poor thing used to have trouble with faxes, it never knew which other device to connect to. I think it had some inferiority complex, being a black-and white printer.

Of course we had times when we got angry and frustrated with it, when it acted like a brat and wouldn't scan or print. As we developed a closer relationship, we could see it had some personality flaws. Simpu had this thing of being misunderstood, and got depressed if we talked about getting a color printer. It had to undergo a by-pass surgery once, and we had all stood with bated heartbeats for it to recover. One day without Simpu, and we felt the world had come to an end.

And now sits in Simpu's place a brand-new Samsung MultiExpress 6122N. We are not really sure we would ever get over this change. Simpu, a modest, hard-working printer, is no more among us. He was getting too hard to adjust with, and we couldn't let its personality issues hamper our work. The Samsung sits here, tall and broad with a proud grin, and already we have trouble accepting it. It makes a lot of noise when it's working, and is such an unbearable show-off.

Well, I'm sure one day we will get used to it, and one day the memories of Simpu will fade away. But we will always be grateful for the device that pulled us through our beginnings, and taught us so much about cartridges and drums and printer chips.

Thank you Simpu, RIP.