I had an old Canon printer (we bought it to print out photos, because my husband is a photographer hobbiest) and it wouldn’t print black and white if the color cartridges were out. It was infuriating.
Edit: Not an HP, a Canon.
Yeah…annoying, isn’t it?
A few years ago I bought an Epson Ecotank. The printer is “expensive” but the toner is cheap. Inside the thing are some sponges that collect wasted-ink (from when you flush the heads or something and perhaps other things). The printer keeps track of how many pages you’ve printed or some such and shuts down completely at that point. You’re supposed to bring those to a certified Epson fixer but you can also clean them your self, buy a computer program from a shady seller on ebay, and reset your sponge counter that way.
I seriously thought nobody has bought an inkjet printer for 10 years. Yet here’s everybody rocking one at home.
You people know that a decently fast laser is like $100 or less, right?
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I started working for a company in 2006 with no dress code, aside from client meetings and conferences and what-not, I’m basically in jeans and a t-shirt seven days a week. At my current company virtually nobody is dressing up - except the tech team, who all seem to coordinate matching boots and puffy vests.
Amen. (Although it’s been a LONG time I’ve printed anything for work. The way our work laptops are locked down, I think it’s either impossible to connect to a personal printer, or I’d be committing some firing-level offense to do so.)
Bit more for color if you want/need that, no? I bought a color HP Laserjet thing like 18 months ago and I think it was $300 but it works really well.
You might ask IT, my machine is pretty locked down but IT is pretty cool about stuff like this. But my last employer, not so much, so YMMV.
I like it better when the ER provides a big, honkin’ printer that prints super fast and I don’t hafta worry about filling up the paper/toners/etc. 
I lost a lot of weight during the pandemic. Because for a while I was changing sizes fairly quickly for a few months, and because I wasn’t going anywhere, my active wardrobe now consists of a couple of 6-packs of t-shirts, a few pairs of sweatpants, and one pair of jeans.
I did buy some “go to church” clothes to attend my father’s funeral last summer, but those are too formal for work.
I’m enjoying the simplicity of my wardrobe and an empty closet. However, unless my company’s “business casual” ends up being a lot more casual than pre-pandemic, I’m going to have to go clothes shopping when it comes time to trek into the office.
My color laser all-in-one device cost a bit more than that. But it was useful for scanning the death certificate, printing name badges for aforementioned class, and all sorts of other stuff. I’m quite happy to have one.
My company’s data security folks went into overdrive.
Pre-pandemic, there were provisions for WFH folks to connect to printers (even ordering multifunction printer/scanners/faxes on the company’s dime), and requirements for us to have locking file cabinets and a specific model of shredder.
Fairly soon after we all went WFH, new policies came out. WFH is now supposed to be mostly paperless. (There seems to be a tacit tolerance for pen-and-paper notetaking. Presumably exam study materials are also OK in hardcopy.)
If we need to print something for work, it has to be on an office printer. If one’s job requires working with paper (I don’t know that too many do anymore), it’s not eligible for WFH post-RTO.
It makes sense data-security wise, and I’m not sorry to see the pickiness over having a particularly annoying shredder go away as a result of the paperlessness. I imagine senior executives could get dispensation from this rule, but I’m not one of them…and really, it’s not a big inconvenience for me.
However, my Officejet died about a year ago, and I splurged on a nice color laser. I find myself wishing I could see some PowerPoint decks printed through my sweet, sweet printer.
(“Fortunately”, the aftermath of settling my late father’s affairs means I’ve had ample opportunity to print non-work stuff.)
Sadly, I can relate, that’s been 80% of my printing in the past year.
I get reasons why printers carry risk. But it’s annoying when you want to print a slide deck that doesn’t have PHI or whatever on it. In such instances I have occasionally emailed them to my personal email so I could print them. 
Even if a slide deck doesn’t have PHI, etc., there’s still intellectual property concerns. It’s presumably easier for IT to simply say/enforce “don’t print away from the office” than to account for things like how the deck for a pop-culture trivia contest at our next social Teams meeting is probably OK to print, but the presentation about a particular product’s performance is not.
Yes, TONS!!!
Not even deliberate eavesdropping… just overhearing people talking.
I bought wool socks.
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I haven’t bought clothes in 2 years. I should probably buy some new clothes.
My wife likes to buy clothes for me - otherwise I probably wouldn’t have had any new clothes over the past 2 years either, aside from perhaps a sports and/or concert t-shirt
Girl same. But I haven’t really worn many clothes either.
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I’ve been a no-socker around the house for most of my life but started wearing them most days starting the 2020-21 winter.
Getting older sucks.
Otherwise, I’ve just bought a few additional pairs of sweatpants, a bunch of t-shirts early last year, and a lot more colorful shorts than I used to wear.