Sorry did I say the right thing to do? Yeh well, maybe I can do that when I have nobody to answer to and when my reputation is important to my business. Perhaps if I employed 5,000 people and had a million customers I wouldn’t worry quite so much. Maybe I would be confident that I could throw a few million bucks at the problem by advertising for new customers that don’t know about me or are disillusioned by their own supplier who is equally inept. It seems to me that the majority of big business really doesn’t care about its customers only its stockholders. Yet the paradox is, if they looked after their customers the stock would take care of itself. 

My latest run in (albeit without actually talking to a human being - such is business these days) hot on the heels of terrible customer service from Bank of America and T-Mobile is with Hewlett Packard. Actually let me just say at this stage I have had great customer support recently from Vonage so it isn’t always one-way traffic. 

I download a lot of audio books on life coaching and self-development and then burn them onto disc to listen to into my car. The copyright only lets me do this on one occasion so I have to get it right. Last night I was burning a cd when I suddenly got his by the blue screen of death and my pc locked up. I knew immediately what the problem was because it had happened several times before. It was the driver from my HP Officejet 6210 causing some form of conflict with my burn software that came loaded with my PC. I immediately unplugged the USB cable to my PC but knew the damage was done because I wouldn’t be allowed to download the same book again even though I’d paid $12 for it. This is about the third time this has happened when I was burning a book and has cost me about $40. 

So why am I whining about this? My printer is 18 months old and I still get the error message below that suggests HP know of the problem and are working quickly to solve it. That’s the same message that I got the first time it happened about 16 months ago! 

Is there a new driver available? Strangely enough, no. So what exactly have HP done in the last 18 months to solve a problem that they know about? I have absolutely no idea and doubt I ever will know, but one thing I do know, is that that I will be looking at Canon and Lexmark a lot more closely next time. 

For you amusement, here is the error message:   

Problem caused by Hewlett-Packard Printer Driver (HPZid412/HPZius12)   

This problem was caused by Hewlett-Packard Printer Driver (HPZid412/HPZius12). Hewlett-Packard Printer Driver (HPZid412/HPZius12) was created by Hewlett-Packard Company.    Hewlett-Packard Company is aware of this problem and working as quickly as possible to make a solution available.