Numbers and Stuff

I went to Office Depot this week to pick up an ink cartridge for my printer.  My printer is an HP Photosmart Plus, which I've had for over a year now.  It's been a decent printer, but it always blows my mind at how quickly the ink runs out.  It seems that I print about 100 pages (in black and white, mostly) and it starts to tell me that I'm  out of ink.  In all the colors.  I have no idea how the magenta runs out on black and white, but that's another story.

When I get to Office Depot, I realize I'd forgotten to get the model number for the ink cartridge I needed, so I looked around the store, and found my printer on the floor.  I opened it up, and saw this cartridge. Now, any sensible, rational, reasonable, semi-intelligent person would look at this cartridge and think "Oh, I need to get model 564." and then go purchase it at the counter.

So I go to the ink section, and found this pack.  Now, I'm no whiz with numbers, but so far as I can tell, the numbers for these two ink cartridges match up - and when things match up, I usually take that at face value and run with it.  I purchase it at the counter (with the accompanied color cartridges as well, sold separately) and head back to the apartment.  As soon as I get back, I rip the box open and go to install the cartridge, where much to my surprise, I find that it doesn't fit!  So I double check the numbers, look back at the box, and that's when I see this on the box of the new black cartridge I just purchased.

In case you can't see it (the picture is a little blurry) it says "Not for use in HP PHOTOSMART PLUS printers", which is the printer that I have.  You have GOT to be kidding me!?  What in the world is this all about?  Who was the idiot who designed this organizational structure!  What this tells me is that although my printer uses the 564 ink cartridge, I didn't get the RIGHT ink cartridge.  

I have a really simple solution to this situation, that I personally think is quite brilliant.  If this is an ink cartridge that doesn't work with the HP Photosmart Plus printers, which actually use 564 cartridges, GIVE IT A DIFFERENT NUMBER!!!  

As if inkjet printer ink isn't expensive enough, now they've got to go and confuse the heck out of the customer base, and dupe us into purchasing ink cartridges that don't actually work for the printers that we thought we had.  I suppose one could ultimately say that this was my fault for not catching the smaller writing below the HUGE "564" that says it didn't work with my printer, but honestly, who reads the fine print anyhow?

I hope I have the receipt somewhere...

On an unrelated note, in one of my technical elective classes, I'm teaching my students how to start a blog.  I have created a new blog that I will be using explicitly for that class, and I will use it to post the videos, pictures, and whatnot of things that happen in that class.  It can be found at http://mrwoahn.wordpress.com.   I will also eventually have links from that link to my students blogs, so you can get a look into their lives.  The class has five girls and one boy, and they all expressed interest in learning about desktop publishing.  So we're starting with creating blogs for them, and then I'm going to use the blog to have them actually post the things that they create - whether they're photos, stories, pictures, artwork, presentations, etc. 

In the other period of technical elective that I teach, we have a lot more physics, science, and engineering taking place.  I'll use the blog to post videos and pictures of things that I do with them as well, however, those students won't be creating blogs.  I just don't see it as something that they'd be interested in pursuing.  The classes have a VERY different dynamic, and it's a lot of fun to work with.  

I've made the conscious decision to not show my students this blog, with the express purpose that word of its existence might spread to certain sources that I would prefer to maintain ignorant.  That would severely limit my ability to write honestly about things that happen at school, and truly - who wants that?