Inkjet printers are rubbish, and I defy anyone to say different. In the past three years I have bought and discarded eight different inkjet printers, and they all had two things in common. Firstly, they were expensive to run, and secondly, they stopped working within eighteen months of purchase. The first time it happened, I rang technical support. After negotiating the minefield of "press three", "press five", "press six", and "An operator will be with you in a moment", I eventually spoke to a helpful young man. After an hour of trying to fix the problem online he said: "It's a mystery isn't it, why don't you parcel it up and post it off to me?" I didn't of course, it wasn't worth the carriage costs, or my time. All I wanted was a machine that worked. So I did what everyone else does, I threw it away, and went out and bought a new machine.

Think back fifteen years to the era of the dot matrix printer. Those chunky beasts would run all day long with never a hiccup, all night too if we asked them. Some of those musclely machines would run all year on one 4.95 ribbon, just so long as we carried out a little bit of ribbon refurbishment. Those machines gave the impression they would run until the end of time, providing they received a little TLC every aeon or two.

Then one day, almost overnight, the era of the dot matrix was over. Along came the so called intelligent printer. Intelligent my backside! We were seduced by their almost silence, and promises of sexy colour pictures. The time of the dominatrix was over and they were consigned to the chasm of doom, a slight Freudian slip perhaps, but you get the picture.

A couple of weeks ago I was so fed up with the sight of dead inkjet printers cluttering up my office and home, I loaded them all into the car and headed off for the local rubbish dump. On the way there I had to pass that giant computer retailer, you know the one, they are always located on the edge of town, and advertise almost daily on television. Their ads usually feature grinning customers and smug staff. I was tempted to dump the dead printers on their forecourt, together with a card saying: "Why don't you sell kit that works?" But I didn't have a suitable pen, nor a piece of card, so I pressed on past their garish plastic signs, to the public dump.

At the tip these days everything is sorted for reclamation purposes. I asked the operative where computer equipment should be left. "Round the other side of the skip mate," he replied smiling, and I grabbed my first armful of dead printers, and set off in that direction. What did I find? Three chunky monitors, the kind of thing that no one wants any more, and two smart looking tower systems, the kind of gals you'd be happy to take home to your mother.