A Tater Tot in My Printer… and a Life Lesson
Michelle Kuehner, ChFC®
I recently discovered a tater tot… in my printer.
Not near the printer. Not under it. Not even suspiciously close to it. No, this was a full commitment situation—lodged neatly inside the ink compartment area like it had a scheduled meeting there.
The culprit? Charlie, my two-year-old grandson. A tiny human with big curiosity and absolutely zero respect for my office equipment (but that’s completely ok).
At first, I had questions. Many questions. Why the printer? Why a tater tot? How did he even open the ink compartment? But mostly: how long has that been in there?
Because here’s the thing about surprises—you usually don’t know they exist until something stops working.
Life is a lot like that printer and tater tot.
Everything hums along just fine… until it doesn’t. When you finally decide to dig a little deeper, you discover something unexpected has been sitting there for who-knows-how-long, quietly causing problems.
The longer it sits there, the more damage it can quietly do. One small, overlooked thing has a way of turning into a much bigger issue—not overnight, but gradually, and usually at the worst possible time.
Maybe it’s not a tater tot (hopefully), but it could be an old subscription you forgot about, a beneficiary designation you haven’t looked at in 12 years, or an account you opened back when flip phones were still a thing.
Out of sight tends to become out of mind. Until suddenly, it’s not.
Charlie didn’t mean any harm. In his world, hiding a tater tot in a printer probably made perfect sense. In our world, though, it’s a reminder that things can get off track in ways we don’t anticipate—and not because we did anything wrong, but because we weren’t looking closely enough.
We all have “ink compartments” in our lives. Places we don’t check often. Areas we assume are fine because, well, they’ve always been fine. But assumptions are where surprises like to live.
Not all surprises are bad, but the ones that involve paperwork, money, or logistics tend to lean in that direction if left unattended.
The good news? A little curiosity goes a long way.
Open the compartment. Look around. See what’s actually there.
Not just when something breaks—but before it does. Preventative curiosity doesn’t get nearly enough credit, but it saves a whole lot of frustration later.
Maybe everything’s exactly as it should be. Great—close it up and move on with your day feeling slightly more responsible than you did five minutes ago.
Maybe you find your version of a tater tot. Something outdated, unnecessary, or quietly causing issues.
Better to find it now than when something “stops printing.”
Charlie, my two-year-old grandson, will keep hiding things. That’s just part of being two. But as adults, we don’t get to claim innocence when we ignore what might be lurking in the corners of our lives.
So, take a page from my printer mishap: check the places you don’t normally check.
You never know what you’ll find.
And if it’s a tater tot… well, at least now you know where it went.
