Caveat Emptor

Last updated on December 11th, 2020 at 03:46 pm

“Caveat emptor.”

I seem to have a thing for Latin, which is ironic since I didn’t take to it so well when I studied it many moons ago.

This time around, the phrase is one that means “buyer beware”. The success of the things we do in life and how awesome the lifestyles we lead will be are partly incumbent upon the decisions we make.

And the purchases we transact are no exception to this rule. I was harshly reminded of this today.

To provide some context: a week today, I’ll be married. Translation: this will very likely be one of the busiest weeks of my life to-date. (Thank goodness I took some time off so that I’m only in office for two more days!) Between last-minute wedding tasks, wrapping things up at work in preparation for my absence, and of course getting blog posts set up so that I don’t have to be “that guy” while on honeymoon, it’s a little insane.

Weddings are hard to plan, and this is but one tale from the many we have from the last eight months.

The task du jour was putting the place cards together so people will know where to sit.

• Blank place cards? Check.
• MS Word template? Check.
• My faithful, trusty HP psc 1210 all-in-one multifunction printer?

Faithful and trusty my ass.

After Sarah had spent time filling out our 200+ guests in the templates (and checking them thrice), the task of getting everything printed was given to me. Because Word is a demon spawn of an application, hours later, I had finally prepared it all, and it was ready to go!

Until the printer decided that it didn’t like the paper anymore.

Stick in one sheet? Jam.

Stick in a pile? Jam.

Give it a few moments to cool off and sweet talk to it, whispering sweet nothings into its USB port? JAM!!!

On top of this, I used up too much paper trying to get it to work, so I needed to venture out the next day to find some more.

So that next day, I take a different route to the subway as I was dropping a clothing donation off. (Brownie points!) On the way back from the drop-off, I came across a yard sale. And AT this yard sale, I saw it. Sitting right there in front of me was:

An EPSON Stylus CX 7450 multi-function printer!!!

It was a sign. An answer to my troubles! It was robust, newer, faster, and only set me back $20!

So I went out to get more place cards. I got some fresh ink for my new buddy. I got back and I was ready. I fed the card stock through and let ‘er FLY!

Beautiful. The card stock went through like MAGIC! I was convinced that the rest of my day would be a breeze, with EPSON having stepped in to save the day!

Except for one small detail…

THE CARD STOCK CAME OUT BLANK.

Wtf?! I’d refilled the ink, set it to black and all was a go. What was up?!

Then I did what I should have done in the first place: RESEARCH.

I came across a page on fixyourownprinter.com that would have been really helpful, had I been thinking. In it were quotes such as:

Spread the word: avoid Epson like the plague!

Epson Printers lately are the biggest load of garbage on the planet.Whoever heard of a printer that won’t print BLACK when you can select USE BLACK INK ONLY in the control panel.NO….You HAVE to have all the colour cartridges with ink in them to print BLACK.So if you want to print a normal black ink on white paper letter, and your Cyan or red or blue cartridge is down on ink, you can’t. Instead you get this eveil winking eye blinking at you almost ordering you to buy more cartridges from the GREEDY FAT CAT Epson organisation.SOLUTION: Bin the printer. Buy Canon.

Welcome to the club of epsons. Every one of thier printers do this at one time or another. My C120 done this on the original black cartridges. New won’t help. With HP and others, you buy a new print head in each cartridge and pay a fortune. epsons have built in printheads which are the problem for plugging. I am now struggling to get this new printer going again. Like many companies, they really don’t CARE about the customer. They look at the big picture and as long as they can con folks into buying, they are happy. This is the problem with out modern money hungry society. They don’t care.

Huh. Didn’t see any of that coming. I even tried some of the solutions listed on the page to get it going, but nothing would take.

So here I was, with a clogged black ink valve, a frustrating day, and a device that’s getting kicked to the curb in the morning.

Worst $20 spent ever.

So heed my cautionary tale! Money is hard to make, easy to spend, and doesn’t grow on trees. So do your research FIRST so you don’t wind up with a very large and very annoying PAPERWEIGHT.

Caveat emptor.

–Casey E. Palmer
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