Ambrand.com

I have a expensive HP Laser Printer, it even has an ethernet socket, and keeps my office whirring. Recently the cyan has been getting watery, so the once vibrant red has become orange. When printing profit and loss sheets the red is just not as intense as it needs to be.

I tried the usual printer solutions

• Turned printer it on and off using the soft button
• Turned printer it on and off by physically unplugging the cable
• Cleaned the printer using the windows drivers
• Replaced the cyan toner cartridge with a new one
• Flashed it with newer data
• Printed to it by USB instead of ethernet

But nothing improved the print quality. Fortunately the printer was still covered by the standard 1 year HP warranty. After a few emails they sent a word document (aggh) with a RMA number or “Bench Repair Reference” in HP parlance. However the address of HPs outsourced repair centre was 200km away from me. I had to find a box and bubble wrap and pack the printer for posting, at my own expense. It cost about EUR 42.

Meanwhile in the office I blew the dust off the indestrucable HP Deskjet 500, connected it to the parallell port of one computer that had an internal IP. I bought a few cartridges - yes you can get anything on eBay - and while being slower it did the job.

A couple of weeks later - beyond the quoted 10 days - I heard from the repair centre had finished doing whatever they do, and it was sitting in their office ready for collection. Collection? yes I had to arrange the transportation, now it was bad enought that I had to pay for it to be sent, and now sent back, but as every businessman knows there are some things that are unavoidable so I took out my company Visa and told them, ok, reluctantly I would pay. But they were not interested, they don’t bring things to the post office, I had to send someone there to collect it.

I visited the websites of the acronym couriers - UPS, DHL, TNT et al - only the former had an arrange collection web form. So I filled in the “from” address, weight of package, and pressed submit. I selected the payment method as “Credit Card”, and pressed submit. That was it, a collection reference number was displayed, but there was no space for me to enter my credit card number. UPS assume a person at the “from” address would show the driver a credit card, but in fact it was me at the “to” address that wanted to pay. So I phoned the UPS free phone number and cancelled the collection. I then phoned another courier, and because I was on the phone, not constrained by the existance of form fields I was able to explain my situation and leave my credit card number on file in their office.

There are alot of lessons to be learned here.

• Always keep a few empty cardboard boxes and bubble wrap around, they come in handy
• When you buy the latest printers, monitors etc, keep a couple of the old ones as backups.
• When creating a web form, always add a “Comment” form field, and make it a large multi-line one
• If you work in a call centre, adjust you headset so that your voice is louder then the background noise
• If you job involves repairing things please understand that everyone you deal with is already annoyed that their item broke, do not make things worse with an attitude