Everybody, and I mean everybody, hates the printer mafia. The Canons, HP’s and Epsons are like modern day dope peddlers, giving their smart multifunction printer/scanner combinations away for a pittance just to get you hooked on their special brand ink cartridges. This week I had to go through one of these heart wrenching I’m-getting-screwed-sideways-moments when ordering cartridges for my new Canon PIXMA printer. Because what were they offering? XL ink Cartridges, containing twice the amount of ink, for printing double the stack of paper (look at the pictogram on the package explaining the concept ’twice as many pages’, justly estimating the intelligence level of their customers who can only be dumb schmucks because, hey, they bought the printer in the first place).

At first I thought: “Wow! Cartridges with twice the amount of ink! Cool!” Double the ink sounded like a really good deal. But then it hit me. This XL cartridge itself is not bigger. To fit in the printer it needs to have exactly the same size as the standard cartridges, which therefore have an ink container big enough to hold double the ink! Call me a pessimist, but this means the standard non-XL ink cartridges are always sold HALF EMPTY!

On a lighter note… did you know that the hunting-related words ‘cartridge’ and ‘partridge’ in Dutch translate to ‘patroon’ and ‘patrijs’? So whereas the English words have the same ending, the Dutch words rime at the beginning. Everything happens for a reason.