In order to post the photobooth pictures of Brian and I over the weekend, I spent about 45 minutes at my roommate's computer trying to get his combination scanner, printer and fax machine to work. Adding nearly any other peripheral on earth has become as easy as just plugging it in. So why are scanners so hard to use?

I started by putting the photo on the tray and pressing the scan button. This was problem number one because the button labeled "scan" is purely decorative. Pressing it made it flash with an error saying I needed to use the software application to scan a photo. The applications name was different than the one the scanner told me to run, but there was only one HP scanning program on the computer, so it wasn't hard to figure out.

Actually getting the software to run took another 10-15 minutes and a few restarts, then once I scanned the photos I had to figure out where it actually saved them because it didn't ask me where to save it or tell me where it was putting it, so it took several more minutes to give up on the app and go track them down in the My Documents folder.

Monday morning after IMing the link to a friend, I told him how impossibly long it took to actually get it scanned. After going through all that, he thought I'd enjoy watching this youTube video.

It turned out to be exactly the printer, the HP 5510 all in one, I fought with over the weekend.