Pissed of woman

I think it's time for a little rant. I was quite offended recently, when I went to a computer store to buy a new printer. You see, we've recently bought a new computer, with Windows XP, and I know that we sometimes have problems with old software. Well we tried installing the software for our HP690c, but of course the software was a bit old, and didn't install. XP does however have an automatic hardware installer, so I tried printing something. It refused to print in colour. We figured this was for one of two reasons. Either the colour ink cartridge had run out, or we needed to install a new driver.

I don't think it was the ink cartridge, because from experience, there's always one colour that runs out first, for instance the yellow, which is very frustrating and gives you funny coloured pictures, and you have to replace the ink cartridge. Here we were getting no colour at all. We had a quick look on the site to see if they had a driver, but their site is quite frankly poorly designed, and we couldn't see one quickly, it seemed that for XP, we didn't need a new driver. So we thought about it. Both our printer and our scanner use parallel ports, but our computer only has one (Yes I know convertors exist). Our printer hasn't printed correctly for years (especially with smudging the ink), in fact after the first cartridge. We could use another printer, as this computer is in my room, and as you can imagine having everyone come into your room to use the printer can be quite frustrating ^_~

So we trudged off to a computer store to buy a new one. After much browsing and being accosted by various shop assistants, we'd pretty much decided to get the HP948c. But we made the fatal decision of talking to a sales assistant first ^_~ He almost point-blank refused to sell us a computer... "As much as I'd love to sell you a new printer, your old one is very much fixable" He put on a patronising I'm-talking-to-a-young-child-who-knows-nothing voice, and started explaining what a driver was. I said I knew, and that we had checked for a new driver on the site, but that apparently we didn't need one for XP anyway. Slightly taken aback, he smiled and said "let's go online and check shall we?". My sister inched off and went to look at the computers on the other side of the shop, although she said that even she could hear his loud voice from over there. He went online, and triumphantly found the page that said:

Windows XP
description: Hp deskjet printer driver information and instructions
date: 10-09-01
rev: 1
size: 19.0 KB

He then took a look at the size and said "ooooooh, look at the size of that thing... Unless you or a friend has broadband, you might want us to burn it onto a cd for you, it'll cost about $15". I looked at him. o_O. He was being serious. I checked the size of the file again. 19KB. O_o. I smiled sweetly and said that no, there'd be no need of that, secretly laughing inside. He'd also failed to see that this "ginormous file" was not actually a driver, it was a text file explaining that we didn't NEED a new driver, which we had already worked out for ourselves....

Changing the subject, I said that it wasn't really the driver anyway, that the old one's been a bit dodgy ever since we got it, so we would like to buy... "ah hah!" he shouted. "I bet it just needs a clean." Inwardly sighing, I patiently listened. He droned on about cleaning heads and stuff, and he must have taken my look of boredom and "can we go now" as not understanding. So he said "You see, your printer needs oiling, just like your car - oh I'm sorry, I mean your sewing machine - does". That was it. Patronising voice, blatant lack of computer skillz, and making comparaisons between printers and Sewing Machines - of all things - to girls. We'd had enough. We thanked him, and left. Without the new printer.

We then tromped around to all the other shops trying to find the same model printer, as there was no way we were going back there. We finally found one and bought it. It works like a dream.

What does it matter to us which shop gets the money anyway? ^_^