Left hand, Right Hand (a*se and elbow)

As you may be aware from recent posts, we have been migrating from using the old Windoze-based kit to Macs. One unfortunate side effect of this is that there is now not a single functioning printer in the house…out of four.

My faithful old HP990cxi will not talk to the Mac because HP, in their wisdom, can’t be bothered to supply up to date drivers. To be fair, it is overdue replacement anyway as the duplex unit packed up and the ink cartridges are so shockingly expensive that I think they may contain ground diamonds or possibly Chateau Lafite Rothschild. The Epson C42 is also no longer supported and using the massive HP plotter would be complete overkill, since it’s 5ft wide and takes 36″ wide rolls of paper, and takes several minutes to start up only to give me an error message. (Unfortunately I can’t get hold of the part that is causing the error in order to repair it). Finally, the cheap Brother All-in-one I bought a few years ago, mainly for the scanner, which does work, is such shockingly poor quality that you’d need bottle bottom glasses to read anything it printed, so blurred is the text. It does not help that both the HP and the Brother are out of ink (the HP soldiers on regardless, but the Brother refused to work without Cyan even if I only want to print in B&W), but I am not prepared to spend the money on ink cartridges just to bin the printers. The upshot of this is that we effectively have no functioning printers.

After extensive research, I found a printer that will meet all our requirements and allow the other four to be junked. It’s not quite up to printing patterns on 3′ wide paper, but it is A3 and rather cheaper than the £1k+ cost of a new plotter and with a considerably smaller footprint. The downside, however, is that it is the top of the range, aimed at serious business users, hard to find, not very competitively priced, out of stock almost everywhere including Epson’s own shop and anyone offering an attractive price definitely doesn’t actually have it. So imagine our delight to discover that PCWorld/Curry had the thing in stock at their larger branches and *bonus* if you bought from their business shop it was £40 cheaper. Marvellous, we thought, and after spending 45 minutes mobilising the offspring, leapt dynamically into the car and headed off to Guildford to buy said printer.

Almost immediately that we walked in, I spotted the beast in question and, for once, was pleased to be pounced on by a young lad, who, according to his badge, purported to be a Business Adviser. Now, I don’t have very high expectations of the people who work in such places, because it usually becomes blindly obvious within a few seconds that they have very little clue (beyond the key features listed on the shelf label) about the product they are trying to sell you. Suffice it to say, I was not disabused of this opinion, but that was fine because I had already done my research, I knew what I wanted and aside from wanting to check the build quality in person, had already decided to buy the thing.

The shelf edge label helpfully said “BUSINESS” under the model name coupled with the full RRP retail price, but since I was talking to the “Business Advisor”, I proceeded on the basis that we were talking about a business sale. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “I’d like to get one of these.”
BA: “You’re a business user?”
Me (pulling out iPad to display web page): “Yes, this is a business purchase and the price you show here is xxx”
BA: “Oh, I can’t do that price, I’m afraid”
Me:”Why not?”
BA: “Because you have to have it delivered”
Me: “But I’m here and you have them in stock. Why can’t I just take one away now?”
BA: “Because it comes straight from the business warehouse and it has to be delivered”
Me: “What about if I pay the delivery charge and you just let me take one from here, then you can get the business warehouse to deliver you a replacement?”
BA: “No, we can’t do that, it has to get shipped from the business warehouse”
Me: “Surely you can get it shipped to here?”
BA: “No, we can’t do that”
Me (realising that no imagination is at work here): “Well can you do anything on the price, like maybe throw in some free ink?”
BA: “I can give you a 10% discount on the ink”
Me (knowing that this is worth about £4  on a full set of high volume ink carts): No, I don’t think so. I’ll buy it online somewhere else.”

And that, readers, is how you lose a sale.

We walk away from the face palm situation and speculate as to the purpose of a Business Advisor who can’t sell you anything, because despite all the boxes stacked on the premises, it has to be shipped from a different warehouse and come with its very own additional carbon footprint.