Email from My Mum

Dear Tam,

Okay, so I was asleep on the sofa. Dad was talking to you it seems and said for me to talk to you which I seemingly started to do only I was talking to the sofa and wasn't on the phone. So dad put me on the phone but I was still asleep. Seemingly I did talk to you but I can't remember. So I woke up and looked at the time and panicked and told dad we had to call you as it was Sunday & dad said it's a bit late now you already spoke to Tam on the phone and you were a bit abrupt. I adamently told dad that I hadn't talked with you at all this weekend hence I was going to call you now and again dad said I had already talked to you so we got into a bit of an arguement as I'm never wrong but eventually this time dad did get through to me and I am so sorry !!! I was sound asleep when I seemingly spoke with you and I have no memory of it at all. I was dreaming however that I had a little pet bunny rabbit with a purple back and a pet worm. A little boy stole my pet worm and while I was panicking and looking for it the baby rabbit ran of. This was all on an old steam train and I was terrified they would (my pets) get of the train somehow and I'd lose them forever. I was screaming at everyone on the train coach I was on to look for the pets but nobody was bothering so I grabbed the little boy by his collar and made him go down on his hands and knees to search under the seats. He found a worm but it wasn't my worm. Meanwhile the baby rabbit had gotten into another coach and a stupid woman saw it and started screaming so everyone there was looking for it to chase it or catch it and throw it of the train. Anyway the dream got worse and worse. This bears no relevance to the fact I can't remember talking to you. I am so sorry. I will try & speak with you tonight (Monday) if you are in. Again Tam - I am so sorry.

Love, Mum

Is insanity genetic?

Worst. Support. Ever.

My officemate's husband's all-in-one (printer, copier, scanner, fax), is scanning yellow, I took a look at it, but I couldn't make it not scan yellow (without making it black and white), so after getting some info from downtown, I called HP.

Naturally, the number provided by downtown was the sales office, and they tell me to call tech support.

Tech support is a nice man in India named "Carlos", who troubleshoots a printer issue with me for 2 hours. I keep interrupting to explain that it's a scanner issue. The printer works fine, no problems, it's only when scanning or copying we have the yellow issue. He acts confused, says it's an all-in-one, one unit, and continues troubleshooting it as a printer issue.

Finally he finds the problem! It's scanning yellow because I'm low on ink… at which point I lose my temper. Before I continue, I should probably explain what I mean by "scan yellow". I mean, anything that should be white, is canary yellow. Putting nothing in the scanner is canary yellow. A blank sheet of paper is canary yellow... if I scan, if I copy (which automatically prints a copy without the computer even being involved), it's all Canary Yellow. Of course I'm low on ink now, I have three sheets covered in yellow ink in front of me, in addition to numerous regularly printed test pages. Thinking back, I maybe should not have used so many big words… "inconceivable" may have been beyond "Carlos".

After I yell at him, he's ready to send me a replacement (after lecturing me that I will just have the same problem unless I replace the ink), but wants my credit card as collateral, in case I don't send back the unit.

I have to interrupt him to say, "Yeah… That's NOT going to happen, I have a Purchase Order Number."

But he couldn't find that purchase order, so wouldn't do it without my credit card. Long story short, after checking with downtown that the purchase order was correct, I did manage to call back and get someone in Canada, who laughed at the ink theory of my problem, and didn't even need any additional numbers to find the account (though he did ask how to spell "Pima").

Guess if you get a Canadian they might not be the worst support ever… but wow that guy was bad. Sadly, I'm pretty sure he worked for the same company I was laid off from 6 months ago.

And here I thought I was done being mean to poor Indians... I really don't have anything against them.