EDIT: This happened back in 2025. Will leave as I’m sure I’m not the only one that didn’t know, but I saw it on hacker news and didn’t realize it was a year old. My bad.
In an odd approach to trying to improve customer tech support, HP allegedly implemented mandatory, 15-minute wait times for people calling the vendor for help with their computers and printers in certain geographies.
Callers from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy were met with the forced holding periods, The Register reported on Thursday. The publication cited internal communications it saw from February 18 that reportedly said the wait times aimed to “influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve, as a faster way to address their support question. This involves inserting a message of high call volumes, to expect a delay in connecting to an agent and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative.”
Brother has started selling printers that require an ink or toner subscription. I had to watch out for that last time I bought one.
Even if they get worse, I’m sure another brand will take their place.
I just bought an MFC color laser printer of theirs, first thing I immediately did was block it from connecting to the internet in my firewall. I guess I’m lucky it still has an older fw version installed. Hopefully I can buy 3rd party toner, I guess I’ll have to wait and see.
For me the solution is simply to just not own a printer. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to print something in the last year. Anyway that’s what parents are for, their house is where you store things you only occasionally want.
I tried that and gave up after a year because it was getting old running to the library every few months to print that one page I needed for something odd that came up. Granted it’s been one of those years where so much life insanity happens that you have to work through. But now I’m happy that I can also print coloring pages and anything else I feel like printing on top of insurance documents that the DMV needs me to mail and passport applications and new tax forms for fun new tax challenges I’ve found myself in, and so on.
But doctor… I am the parent.
Seriously, half the stuff that we print is coloring pages.