A Storm Of Technological Breakdowns

Our office has gone “paperless”, which means I have to scan and upload all the paper I generate so the broker can review it and archive it. I of course now have to keep all the paper as a back up to the “paperless” archive.

Last Thursday evening during the big wind storm, we lost power about a dozen times in 1 hour. I was never able to get a clean shut down. Each time the old HP all-in-one (which has worked wonderfully for over a year) kept trying to reboot, or if it did, I do the shut down/turnoff thing  and the power would go out again in the middle of . It must have happened so often that it fried the machine.

3 hours of tech support chat got me nowhere, so I went to buy a new one. I bought the same model, because all of my ink cartridges were only 2 days old. That’s what I get for trying to save 75 dollars. Though I will say, that the same model cost 100. less than it did a year ago. I wish I could say that about the last tank of gas. There’s certainly something to be said about never having to go more than 3 miles away from home.

I’ve spent the whole weekend trying to install the new all-in-one printer/fax/scanner. We’ve installed and uninstalled the software 7 times. After my experience in tech chat hell with the old unit, I decided to call the 800 techsupport number after the software installation failed. Sunday was spent talking to the Philipines while we installed and uninstalled and reinstalled a total of 7 times. Each time took about an hour.

I gave up at 2:30am last night, and started over again with them this morning at 8am.

I now have a printer, but no scanner and no fax. They’ve “escalated” the case to the software engineers, and they’ll “get back to me in 2 or 3 days”.

And I thought it was frustrating getting the real estate deals to close. It’s a very good thing in both cases that I’m so tenacious.