I recently had a new office printer install at a client, which crapped out with a random error not even a week afterwards. Said error didn't show up on the website as anything special (led to the generic printer head cleaning FAQ page that seems to constitute like 99% of that site) - until I happened upon the product page by accident, where they offered a no-questions-asked replacement in a small rather hidden CSS popup, which in turn led me to a web form that wouldn't work in anything but friggen IE, which also didn't notify the provided email address about shipping or the general proceedings or fucking anything dammit, which resulted in the new printer being delivered on a weekend and dropped off at a neighbouring office because their cleaning lady signed for it. The free shipping back was only free within five days after delivery of the replacement part, which combined with the wrong delivery and my busy schedule resulted in me having to bend over backwards to wedge that in. Then I had one hell of a time battling the service gal at the shipping hotline just to get pickup of the old machine sorted. No timetable for that was given, and although my client had staff on site the entire day the driver never showed up, resulting in an entire afternoon of back and forth with the two hotlines in a conference call until I finally got HP and the shipping company to commit to a new date and even a rough time frame (9 am to 3 pm). The driver showed up somewhen in the afternoon if my client is to be believed. But hey they got a free stack of photo paper. Yay.
Oh yeah, and the replacement wouldn't turn on with the old retail ink carts, requiring the installation of the pack-in "five drops of ink" carts. It also randomly decided it didn't want to talk to one of the network PCs without a complete driver reinstall on that machine. It also takes ages to get ready to print, so I'm half expecting to re-do the electric boogaloo soon.
Also, the thing is controlled by using a seriously tiny touchscreen. Whoever thought of that one needs to be burned at the stake. The office staff at that client can't handle UIs that involve scrolling, "deep" menus and onscreen buttons that can easily be misclicked. FML. Just put a copy, fax and scan button plus a numpad on that thing dammit. Wish I would have been asked for input before the purchase.
Another one was awesome. It filled up with ink on the inside, admittedly over the course of several years. When it finally crapped out with a random print head related error (surprise!) that couldn't be resolved by a thorough cleaning and buying a 65 replacement print head from HP it was decided it'd be kicked out in favour of a Laser printer. When I removed it from its throne atop an expensive office storage cabinet for the initial cleaning I found out the sludge had seeped out and dripped down the back, covering the wall and the backside of the cabinet. The staff had noticed the printer had been rather thirsty, and yes, there was the occasional botched printout, but hey, expenses like ink are paid by HQ, HQ is in another country, and lol tech is hard, so who cares.
Seriously, fuck HP. Brother all day e'rry day for me. They put out the occasional lemon as well, but when they work they goddamn work.
