If the cheap advice isn’t working, try a paper clip
Thankfully I wasn’t calling about an emergency. After three rounds with customer service at a major printer company, I managed to waste a lot of time; not much else.
Last morning started with a heads up from the people in payroll. Their departmental printer wasn’t responding to requests, and at this point in the “cycle”, that’s not good. The printer is a large lump with some software smarts: control multiple trays, flip and reprint on the same sheet of paper, all the things that my home printer can’t do. And, with the wonders of technology, you can address the printer via a multilingual front panel OR an internal web server.
Except in this case. Across the display, a cryptic message, telling us in reverse bold text that “USB Device unsupported”. Pardon my grammar. We weren’t “using” a USB device, nor was there any short term plan to do so. Nothing else of interest here. A large lump.
My first call to the service centre took time. Any time an automatic attendant announces the office hours (and you’re already within the time frame), things are going to take longer than necessary. I called back, at regular intervals, for several hours until I finally got my first human: Rae.
We tried the usual things; access via the browser interface, factory resets, nasty subvocal murmurs. She eventually gave me an access code to try updating firmware, but that didn’t work. Not via my web browser, not via FTP, not via a direct USB connection from an available laptop. Two percent and then failure.
My second call, later in the afternoon, saw me going around in logical circles with another human: Angel. All that I accomplished was to spell my name, five different times.
I called again, this morning. Someone clued in that I was in Canada, so my call was “transferred”. I’ll grant this, the person was honest, when he said that he wasn’t a real printer service agent, just someone in a call centre. He identified the important detail. This printer was no longer under guarantee, so any further effort would be on my “dime”. He then used his copy of Google to locate three service depots within my city limits and bid me farewell.
One of the other technicians happened to stick a paperclip into the USB socket, and the error message disappeared. We now have decided to forego service and simply not shut the printer power off for the next few weeks. There’s a difference between service call service and good old ingenuity.
