An Open Letter

Dear BrotherUSA,

Considering your website is so extremely unhelpful, and you've made it almost impossible to contact you directly (at least without a long distance phonecall or sending you a message through the US Mail, which would be completely ignored), I thought I'd write an open letter to you here.

Can you please give me a reasonable explanation for the following:

1) If I leave my printer on, it 'cleans' itself every single day. This uses a significant amount of ink and it totally unnecessary. My last printer would only clean itself if you told it to, and I only actually had to use this feature once in two years. Why have you set this printer to waste massive amounts of ink for no reason?

2) Your 'status monitor' tells me my ink cartridge is empty, despite the fact a simple examination shows it to be at least 1/5th full. Why is this?

3) I want to print some normal text in black and white. My black ink is full, yet your piece of shit printer refuses to print black on white because the cyan ink is empty. Since when is Cyan needed to print black?

4) Lastly, it costs me almost a hundred dollars to buy replacement cartridges. For a hundred dollars I can print the grand total of about seven 8x10 pictures. Considering I'm providing the paper, don't you think fifteen dollars a print is a little steep? Especially when you make me throw away the ink cartridge before it's even empty.

To be honest, I know the answer to these questions. You screw your customers up the ass because you can. It's not enough that your printer ink comes to almost $8000 a gallon. You also feel the need to make me throw away ink cartridges before they're empty, force me to buy ink that I don't actually need and waste the ink I do buy by making your printer waste it on unnecessary 'cleaning'.

Oh, then you have the sheer balls by telling me I'm 'saving the environment' by sending my used cartridges back to you at my own expense. Sure, I'm 'saving the environment' by sending back a quarter-full cartridge so you don't have to spend the money to make new ones. Why not just go the whole hog and tell us we have to rent the cartridges? Maybe you could squeeze a deposit out of us for them as well.

I understand the concept that used to ring true. You sell an expensive piece of technology to us as a loss because you know you're going to make your money back on the consumables. However, considering how one set of replacement cartridges costs me almost twice what I paid for the printer...you're just taking the piss.

Anyway, I would have gone to the trouble to send this to you directly, but I know I'd either be ignored or get a bullshit response.

You suck.

Paulius.