Talking of thieving printers.

Our bank of Epson BJs were getting long in the tooth, what with blocked heads and all. Head cleaning wasn't solving their problems either.

We no longer print onto CD-ROM, and post 32,000 of them a year all across the world, like we used to. We no longer do snail mail shots and all invoicing is now on-line.

But we do still need a decent printer. For meeting the never ending and asinine, intrusion by damned French 'Fonctionnaires'* demanding this and that documents almost every week.         *Government Jobsworths!

Pissed off with Epson for stealing copious amounts of ink we decided to buy an HP bubble jet printer.

The setup procedure was written by le Marquee de Sade. Diabolical! A counter intuitive, digital obstacle course! Took half a day to wade through it.

Over a period of six months we printed only around a dozen full colour pages for the jobsworths. The rest, being B & W we still used the old Epsons, as the Epsons worked fine for those.

We were somewhat amazed therefore to discover the HP had run out of ink, across all four cartridges. What it was doing, unbeknown to us, was purging the cartridges whenever it powered up. Which in our case is daily!

For lots of reasons, such as lightning strikes blowing up hard drives and finding a PC had mysteriously added 8 giggly bites of goodness knows what during the night. we therefore always disconnect the power supply to the whole upstairs offices each night.

I am still pondering over whether Death by Lethal Injection, shooting, hanging by the neck until dead or life imprisonment with hard labour would be the most fitting reward for fucking, thieving HP marketeers!

In the meantime it is the last piece of HP kit we will ever buy. Which is a shame because HP PCs and monitors are damned good and over three decades and up until now we have never bought anything else.

Mistral's commitment:
Bringing the benefits of computerisation to our industry - without the historically associated problems.