Dot Matris came in to being in 1968, when the very first computer printer experienced it’s first technical fault. Dot Matris is a not so much a “Mother” of printers in the nurturing sense. She’s more a “Mother” in the Samuel L. Jackson sense. Dot Matris is always depicted wearing a distinctive high-waisted “micro line” dress. In her mythology, Dot Matris is married to the handsome mortal Prince Gamut. Together they work to try and foil the evil schemes of the Plotters. She is said to fly across the heavens in her celestial fighter aircraft, known as “The Laser Jet” singing as she goes. Well, I say singing. It’s more of a shrill, rhythmic, buzzing scream.
Dot Matris loathes poor organisation, bad time management and last minute rushes. Therefore, prayers will only be answered when your print job is not time critical. The closer you are to your deadline, the more likely it is that your prayers will fall on deaf ears. Sometime she will further punish you for the hubris of expecting her aid, by spreading a plague of bugs through all your technical devices. It is vital that you only pray to Dot Matris once for each print job. If you pray to her repeatedly, she will get annoyed. Nothing will come out of your printer until after you need it. Then a thousand copies will suddenly spew forth into the air, and you will be powerless to stop them.
The principle temple of Dot Matris is in Epsom in the UK. It is a very recent structure. It has been cleverly 3D printed from concrete, plastic and chocolate. (There is a video on YouTube about how they did it in “Just a day!”). The temple is populated and maintained by her sacred order known as the “Brother Printers”.
This sect is lead by the “Printer Head”. “Brothers” may be of any gender. The current Printer Head is Daisy Wheeler. She is the fifth to hold the title. (The first to hold that title has now been Canonised as St Hewlett of Packard.) The next Printer Head will be divinely chosen by Dot Matris before their birth. The Brothers will know them by the “Lexmark”, which will manifest somewhere upon their body.
The altar at the centre of the temple is designed to dispense the daily offerings of consumables which are made to appease the goddess. Dot Matris is said to eat a hundred reams of the finest quality paper every day. These are lovingly loaded into plastic trays by the Brothers in order to make the feeding easier. She abhors cheap paper, and if offered anything less than 90gsm she will just chew it up and spit it out.
On the top of the altar stand four elegant vessels for the goddess’s beverages. She will be offered, and drink, five gallons of ink every day (a gallon of black, a gallon of magenta, a gallon of cyan, and for some weird reason, two gallons of yellow) . If any one of these reservoirs runs dry, the goddess will shut down and refuse to do anything. The holy ink they must provide for the offering is incredibly rare and precious. It is made from dragon’s milk and mermaid’s toenails. The goddess will only accept the genuine stuff. If given a cheaper substitute she will send you many messages of dire warning. In order to get this holy ink the priesthood have to buy hundreds and hundreds of brand new printers every day and extract the ink from each one. This has turned out to be by far the cheapest way of doing it (around the back of the temple is a landfill pit, overflowing with thousands of forlorn, drained printers.)
If you visit the temple. Do try to coincide your visit with one of their excellent “Jammin'” sessions. These involve an informal group gathering around a blocked printer, and freestyle riffing advice on how to fix it, whilst the owner of the printer tries not to worry about a thing, and believe that every little thing’s gonna be alright. I think it is a lot of fun. When you get to try it, I hope you like Jammin’ too. Refreshments are usually served at these sessions, notably the traditional “Bubblejet Tea”. Before the end of your visit, why not take the opportunity to make a-toner-ment for your sins.
The sacred text of Dot Matris is known as “The Manual”. The scared text gets fainter and fainter as you progress towards the end, but this doesn’t matter. It has never been read, people have only ever glanced at the diagrams.
Thank you to Rhiannon Williams (@Feiryred) , for the brilliant suggestion of Dot Matris. Welcome to the Hive Mind.
Idol Scribblings Volume Two
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