His wife, Priya, walked in with two cups of chai. “You know, they sell new all-in-ones for eighty dollars at the big-box store.”

Priya sighed, placed the chai down, and kissed his forehead. “You’re not a tech wizard, Arjun. You’re a book wizard. Call the repair shop.”

He had tried everything. Windows Troubleshooter (useless, as always). Downloading drivers from Kyocera’s website, only to find that the latest driver was for Windows 7. He’d tried compatibility mode. He’d tried a registry hack a guy on Reddit named ‘USB_Necromancer’ had posted in 2019. Nothing.

“Better,” Arjun said, a grin spreading across his face. “I made friends with it.”

From the doorway, Priya whispered, “Did you exorcise the demon?”

Arjun ran a small used bookstore, The Dog-Eared Page . His inventory system was a miracle of duct tape and Visual Basic. Every week, he scanned the ISBNs of incoming used books using the Kyocera’s flatbed. The old workhorse printed invoices in grainy, glorious 600 DPI, and its scanner had been loyal for a decade. But after the latest Windows update—the dreaded 22H2—the scanner had gone blind.