December 19, 2006 by Amy

I smite thee: Epson Tech Support!

Last night, which was planned to be highly productive and actually enjoyable, turned out to be not so much.

New ink cartridge in the 2200 photo printer, and yours truly, in her infinite wisdom, decided to try Matte Black instead of Photo Black (see a post from months ago about the different blacks in photography) for the first time ever, right before Christmas. Supposedly you can just switch your Photo Black cartridge with a Matte Black cartridge and print right along. That’s what the evil tech support people at Epson would tell you.

Here’s a hint for you: screaming at the on-line diagnostic tool “That doesn’t work you flipping piece of ^%#*!” doesn’t help.

M and I spent a goodly portion of our evening trying to get my printer to print, which we thought was entirely possible given that it had just been printing merrily along the night before.

Turns out that when you switch your Photo Black cartridge to Matte Black, your customized profile pre-sets in your print dialog box no longer work.

I’m pretty sure this means nothing to the majority of you reading this, so suffice it to say that it was an idiot rookie mistake that I only realized after going off the Epson site, googling my issue, and having the fine folks at The Luminous Landscape tell me what to do. Funny how that works, isn’t it? You spend hundreds of dollars on a piece of equipment and the manufacturer can’t help you, but another user whom you don’t even know can post a quick little “Oh yeah, and don’t forget to do this” and solve your whole issue.

Many thanks to M for prying me off the Epson web site and insisting that I google. (Me: “The answer has to be here somewhere! It’s Epson’s own site, for Pete’s sake!” M: “Just google it already! You keep reading the same things over and over, and they’re not helping!”)

Today’s lunch break will be spent frolicking all over Brentwood and Clayton again, getting more Christmas presents. We keep whittling away at it, but it seems like we never really get anywhere. It’s sort of like when I make tabouli (mmmm, tabouli) and it’s in a giant bowl and no matter how much I eat, there is still more and more and more left. Only I love tabouli and I do not love fighting the hordes of last-minute Christmas shoppers so I can get my last-minute Christmas shopping done.

You know what’s fun to do at night? It’s fun to sit in your house and watch all the cars slow down and sometimes even stop just to look at your Christmas lights. Because we’ve been so busy the last few nights, that isn’t all we do, but we enjoy it nonetheless. We sit at our respective computers, after Zozo is in bed, and we work. And every once in awhile one of us says, “Car!” and the other stops and watches. I keep thinking we should really get a toteboard and keep a running score, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

My Things and People to Smite List is growing:
Ameren
Brentwood PO
Epson Tech Support (not the R&D folks who created my fantastic printer, just to clarify)
The people who angrily honk at the nice folks who stop to look at our lights