Sometime this past week, my parents went to an electronics store and purchased a Bluetooth earbud. The earbud cost a little bit over $20, but there was a $20 rebate, so it was almost free except for tax and the gasoline required to drive to the store.

Normally, when you purchase a product that has a corresponding rebate, you receive the rebate form so you can fill it out and mail it to the manufacturer. Oddly, for this rebate, we had to go to the store’s web­site and print the form ourselves.

When I went to print the rebate form, I noticed that it was a PDF with a huge picture of the earbud and a red background. The form only had about four lines for a name, address, and phone number, but the in­structions said that the information must be filled out on the original rebate form (which was the PDF I was looking at).

If you haven’t noticed the problem already, in order to claim this $20 rebate, I would have to waste tons of printer ink by printing out this unnecessarily colorful piece of paper. The worst part is, I have an ink jet printer at home, and not a roller or a toner printer, which means, if I were to print this rebate form at home, I would end up with a sheet of paper drenched and dripping wet with ink.

Being the resourceful person I am, I realized that if I were to instead take this PDF file to the local public li­brary, I could print it for 10¢ and not waste any ink at home. So, I downloaded the PDF file, emailed it to myself, and drove a few kilometers over to the library.

You think my troubles are coming to an end? I’m actually just getting started.

Upon entering the public library (which was recently remodeled in a way such that half the library now looks brand new while half the library still looks ancient), I navigated my way over to the row of com­put­ers. I moved the mouse around a little bit, but couldn’t get it to unlock, and got a message that I had to make a reservation first. Not knowing where to make a reservation, I went over to the adult services desk to ask for help.

I stood in line behind an old woman who was apparently having trouble with every aspect of her life at the same time and needed three people to help her at once. After waiting about five minutes, another library employee came over to me and offered to help.

She led me over to a random computer with no keyboard and told me to scan my library card to make a reservation. I asked her why they had a reservation system in place when they could just have people type in their library card numbers directly into the computer they wished to use, and she replied that the library gets extremely busy and they need to use the reservation system to keep the system running smoothly.

I looked over to the computers; there were about 12 computers total, and only four of them were in use. It was the evening of a weekday when you would expect it to be most busy, yet two-thirds of the computers were empty. I looked back at the library employee who was helping me, and she appeared to make a conscious effort to ignore the fact that a reservation system was completely unnecessary.

As expected, my reservation time started right away. The ridiculous part was that instead of placing me on a computer where I wouldn’t have to sit next to anybody so I could have my own personal space, it assigned me to a computer in between a large old man and an aisle everyone had to pass to get to the non-fiction section of the library.

After frustratingly making my way over to my assigned computer and opening up an Internet browser as the old man next to me watched in curiosity, I logged in to my email to open up the PDF file so I could print it and get out of the library as soon as possible. Logging in itself took about two minutes because the Internet was so slow; on top of that, I have two-step authentication in case someone hacks my password, so I had an extra page to go through.

After finally opening up the email, I went to download the PDF.

File size: 0.8 MB. Time remaining: 9 minutes.

The download speed was fluctuating between 1 and 2 KB/s.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with file sizes and Internet download speeds, let me put this simply for you: THAT IS A HUGE FILE FOR A ONE-PAGE PDF, AND THIS INTERNET IS SLOWER THAN DIAL-UP FROM TEN YEARS AGO.

After patiently staring at the computer monitor for nine minutes while the old man to my left and about a hundred passerbys to my right glanced at what I was doing, the PDF file finally finished downloading and I successfully opened it. I sent the print job to the printer that corresponded with what I thought was the printer near the adult service desk, locked my computer, and went over to pick up my document.

I inserted 10¢ into the printer and waited.

Nothing happened.

As if the reservation system wasn’t complex enough, the library thought it would also be a good idea to make it such that if you want to print something, you have to enable the printing job from another separate computer (again with no keyboard) before it begins to process.

After about 20 minutes, I finally got my one page printed and I walked out of the library.

I don’t know why people think it’s a great idea to make things eight times harder than they should be.