For the last six or seven months, each time I wanted to print something,
my Hewlett Packard DeskWriter 660C Printer balked. It balked not once but
twice. It insisted that even tho I had bought two perfectly good, brand new
cartridges and aligned and cleaned the thing to hospital operating room specs
- "the color cartridge is not installed properly" and "you've installed a new
cartridge, please run the alignment procedure."

What was required to print anything was to hit the "continue" button
on each of these warnings each and every time I wanted to print.

After the major cleaning and two alignments and several jet cleaning cycles
it started to print even worse. It would only partially print stuff. Kind of
like a ghost image of what words should look like.

Then when I wanted to print out some invoices it finally broke my patience.

I called around trying to see who might be able to fix this thing, and I
tried to find out how much. No one locally wanted to take this heap on. Everyone
insisted I call HP.

I tried.

Endlessly, and I tried email to tech support also.

It became evident that if I wanted to deal with HP it would run quite a bit of
money chasing someone down. Miraculously I finally got through to someone helpful,
explained my situation and heard a groan on the other end of the line.
I heard a deep breath and then I was instructed to mail the thing back
to HP in it's original carton and be prepared to pay between $100 and $150 plus shipping for a repair.

I hit the bloomin roof!

I haven't had the carton for a couple years now.

"Make sure you have it double bubble wrapped in a carton that can be resused to send back".

Yesterday afternoon ( 10/1/99) I purchased a new Epson 740i which will work
on my G3 and any subsequent firewire enabled box in the future.
Cost - $239 less $50 for a mail in rebate.

I then indulged in a fantasy of relieving the HP of it's misery and enjoyed
wailing on it with my aluminum baseball bat.

It felt so good!