Le monde du vieux bandit

Herb guessed correctly. I asked him, based on what he knows in general, what electronic piece of equipment I saw most often offered on the Montreal freecycle group. And the brand name. An additional hint: the items offered are nearly always non-functional. Can you guess what it is? He knew the answer because we happened to be a pair of unfortunate buyers a few years ago. The item worked for a few months and then just died. We tried everything we could, spent countless hours on discussion groups, called the company — everything. The result was, basically, that we could possibly get it repaired, but for more than the price of purchase. The company itself blamed us, the customers, saying that their similar items do break if… the customer forgets to turn them off once. So instead of fixing this by adding an auto-shut off, they blame the customer and hence, lose the customer forever.

So have you guessed what broken electronic item is most often seen offered on freecycle? Have you guessed what it is you should never ever buy (or if you do, you will have been warned and will only have yourself to blame)? It’s an epson printer. Or, as I like to call mine, the huge ugly gray and black paperweight in the corner there waiting to be hauled off to the dangerous waste dump. Laserjet my ass. Laserjet this, Epson. I’m very serious: the company told us that it was our fault. We had forgotten to turn off the printer one night. Now it was dead. Great customer service. Great Product. (I am now the happy owner of a Brother laser printer which has shown no sign of letting me down. The only problem was, I had bought the Epson to print colour pictures, and my spiffy laser just can’t do that. Still, better to have black only rather than nothing.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 5:50 pm and is filed under humanit(é)y, * in english. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.