Really - I am just in the country next door!

I love these new printer toner cartridges that tell you when they are empty. Remember the days when a cartridge began to run dry and print became all streaky and wobbly?

You could take the cartridge out and shake it from side to side and get it to print a few hundred pages more. This decision making process is now no longer required by the customer. The new cartridges make the decision for you.  The toner lights goes on. It’s all over! It’s like the flat green line on the machine the goes beep in the medical shows.

I am empty. I am not printing another page. It’s good night Vienna.

Oh purleease! Are you telling me there is not enough toner inside you to print one more page? Not a single solitary page?

There may well be – but I am not at liberty to release that information -  and I am not printing any more. I have finished. My tour of duty is over. Ich bin Kaputt! Please play The Last Post and insert a Genuine Replacement Part.

You can open me up and check if you like. That is if you would like to look like a chimney sweep for the next six weeks and have your house and pets covered entirely with a fine layer of black, oily ink that will NEVER dry and that you will NEVER get out of your clothes – especially the white ones. Go on – have a go. I love it when people do that.

What I do find in Vienna is that it is extraordinarily difficult to buy reasonably priced cartridges for my printer. I can buy them from the local store for about €80 but I can get them online from a supplier in Germany for €36 plus delivery – except that the supplier hasn’t got the hang of selling them online outside Germany yet so we have to do a lot of toing and froing to actually get the order done.

What I mean is that I go on line and order and they quote and I order and I pay direct to their bank account in Germany. A few days later they send me an email saying that it is extra to send to Austria so I have to send them the additional amount. They have not been able to program in the postage to Austria – this is apparently very difficult.

Mostly this works OK but it is very tedious. 

On the weekend I ordered some cartridges and saw that I could now pay with PayPal – so I did that – and on Monday morning I got an email from a man saying that it would cost me an extra €20 to send the cartridges to Australia. WTF?

I also got a consignment note from DHL saying that the cartridges were in fact on their way to my address in Australia. Oh Dear. (OK so my PayPay account uses my Australian Bank Account – but really!)

I sent a message back saying it would probably be better if you sent the cartridges to me in Austria because that is where my printer is.

Sandra Eckelman from the cartridge people has responded saying

‘Best thanks to for your purchase. It concerns a secured payment over PayPal.  Unfortunately the address not manually subsequently can be changed. We ask for your understanding.’

To which of course I have responded that I do indeed understand -but it does not advance the resolution of my problem - and do they have a solution in mind in regards to getting the printer cartridges to the actual address requested for the delivery. That is – in Austria – which is next door to Germany. If you peek out your window you can almost see me.

Look – I do not expect a response – and if I get one it will probably be along the lines of the German customer service mantra ‘the customer is always wrong and/or fucked’ so on this basis I have ordered more printer cartridges from another supplier.

I expect that this cartridge retrieval process will be a long an excruciating one and that I will have to enlist the formidable skills of Rozalin to actually get hold of the cartridges – but even with her involved this will take some considerable time – and indeed may not be possible.