Takin’ What They’re Givin’

…..actually, I’m not workin’ for a livin’ any more, but still, Huey and his News had the right idea, and it was long ago. Modern life requires one to just shut up and deal with it, like it or not.

So, fair warning, this article will be in the vein of ‘old grumpy guy is pissed off’. Very unusual for me, I know.

Still, it’s my blog, so pull up a chair.

I went to Canadian Tire this afternoon with a short list of items to seek out. I love Canadian Tire. Resolutely Canadian, they stock so many useful things, as well as things I didn’t think I needed until I saw them, and sometimes their staff are even helpful about finding things and offering advice.

This afternoon I found exactly four things, three from my list plus a bonus, and needed no staff help to find them. Happy, I walked to the checkout with my basket of goods and a bag of my own to put them in. (I suspect that most of you have a bag full of bags in your car, now that stores no longer provide them for free.)

I put the items on the counter, the young cashier laser-checked them through, and I paid with my credit card. While I was paying, the four items and my self-provided bag sat there on the counter between us. After I finished paying, there they still sat. I looked the young feller in the eye and said ‘Don’t worry, I got this’ and proceeded to put the four items into my bag. It is possible I saw some flash of recognition in his eyes that I was calling out his choosing to stand there with his hands on his hips while I paid and then packed up my own stuff. Possible, but not certain.

This is de rigueur behaviour at most retail outlets, these days. Now that we must supply or buy our own bags, the staff see no reason to pack what we buy into said bags. Back when the stores provided bags, their employees packed them. The logic of that change in position eludes me, but there it is. (Perhaps they think our self-provided bags have cooties? Maybe.)

At this point I do nearly all my grocery shopping at either Sobey’s or Farm Boy, and I think it is not a coincidence that they now share the same owner. They are the only two grocery outlets at which the clerks reliably, willingly and cheerfully pack up my purchases. I stopped going to the Metro store right near my home precisely because they won’t do that, and the clerks are positively surly. Who needs that? In a supposedly competitive business with very small profit margins, why would you allow your employees to behave that way?

I dunno, so I do the only thing I can – shop elsewhere.

I also shop in the village neighbourhood independent grocer a fair bit, because it is so damned close and convenient. The clerks there are split between surly and helpful. Not long ago it was a small friendly place to shop. It’s still small, only occasionally friendly. The surly clerks specialize in sending the next customer’s purchases down the chute while you are still packing up your own. I think our scrambling to keep our purchases separate amuses them.

As long as I’m on a roll, and since it also happened today, one more rant about service. I own an Epson EcoTank printer, which I bought because the ink re-fill thing seemed superior. When the ink gets low, you just buy inks in bottles and re-fill the various tanks. Easy.

Well, despite my penchant for reading things on paper, I owned the printer for a long time before much ink had gone, and then last week it refused to print, saying the ink was too low. The printer has windows so you can observe the ink levels directly, and although the black was the lowest, none of them were really low.

But we know there is no use arguing with software, so I went and bought a bottle of the black ink – two, actually, as the clerk at Staples sold me the wrong one at first, which I exchanged.

Having refilled the black ink, is that the end of it? Hell no, then you have to go into the printer software and follow the instructions to manually ‘reset the ink levels’. Now, if the software was telling me the ink was low in the first place, why do I have to do this manually? How did the software know the ink was low, but now that I have refilled it, needs me to tell it the levels? Small minds like ours can never answer such complex questions, I suppose.

Naturally, doing this re-set requires punching a handful of tiny buttons on the printer in a way that strictly conforms to instructions that appear on a screen the size of a postage stamp. Punch the wrong button and you get ‘invalid’.

Well, I did all that with only minimal amounts of blue language, then had to futz around with it all some more, but eventually I got it to print a few things I needed.

Today I tried to print a one page pdf.  The goddam printer refuses to do so, and even more infuriating, up pops a little window on my laptop screen telling me all the ink tanks are empty.

Buy Epson Ink it says at the bottom.

Guess what I said in reply to that.

Having failed in all my attempts to get the infernal thing to print that one page, I have done what we all do, and let’s be honest, what the techie types also do – I have turned the goddam printer off and unplugged it.

I also  told it to sit and think about what it had done.

Or not done, in this case.

What do you think are the chances it will print when I turn it back on?

What do you think are the chances I could learn to build IEDs?

Follow up: PO + 1.5 hours

I turned the printer back on, and tried once again to print the desired one page PDF.

Nothing happened for perhaps five minutes, then I got a message on my laptop ‘Printer ET-2500 could not print Job 1’ .

….followed by another message indicating again that my printer was entirely out of ink.

Hearing noises from upstairs where the printer lives, I went up: the one page had printed.

We’ll see what happens next, I am not optimistic.