tale of five printers

We had a printer that worked for many years.  I think it was from before Erik and I were together.  Is that possible, 12 years?  I do not know.

And it stopped feeding paper, so it no longer worked.  So we decided to get a new printer at a thrift store.  We bought one and the driver downloaded automatically and it printed but poorly.  The output isn't good enough for my needs, and probably wouldn't be good enough for most people's needs. 

So I asked for a printer on freecycle, and someone offered me a printer with no ink--I thought I could do better and never replied.  (I should reply.)

So we bought another thrift store printer.  But it didn't work either.  We couldn't get the computer and printer to communicate.

And so we bought a third thrift store printer this afternoon.  It prints blank pages.

At this point we are wondering why people donate non-working printers to thrift stores.  I am also wondering if we had incredibly bad luck or if a printer's just not the kind of thing that should be bought at a thrift store.  I'm also wondering how to proceed. 

My bestie offered that I could email her the pages and she could print them out and mail them to me, but I use OpenOffice which she doesn't use, so I don't think that'd work.  Also, we need our own printer because Erik always prints maps before he goes hiking. 

Any ideas of what we should do?