Ah… Dear Reader, so we meet again.
Today I bring you a harrowing tale of tragic tribulations. Beware reading further. If you have a heart condition or faint easily it might be better for you to scroll through MLM ads on Facebook.
Still there? You do dabble in danger and delight in difficulty! Very well, without further ado, allow me to regale you with a tale.
At my work, I have a high production Ricoh printer. We use the heck out of it. While we keep tons of toner in stock sometimes the photoconductor or fuser will go out and we need a replacement. But while we are waiting for the part to come in, we are basically dead in the water when it comes to printing. While it rarely happens there are times when, using a printer as heavily as we do, a service technician needs to come and fix something and we are in the same situation.
We had the bright idea, why not just order another printer. When we need a large print job (like in-store signage for 15 stores) we could split up the work between 2 printers and if one goes out, well we would still be able to finish the job on the other.
So I called Ricoh and tried to get in touch with their sales department. I made it easy, I want a price on the same printer I already have. They said someone in sales would call to set up a time to meet with us at our corporate office. I let them know they would only be wasting their time and if they could give me a price that would be all I would need.
Basically, think back to Prom. I am the “sure thing”.
Pretty much if their price beat reseller pricing I am buying.
A WEEK goes by and I hear nothing. I call again. I was given apologies and was given numbers for local sales offices (which I was told I couldn’t get on my first call). We were wanting to buy the printer outright rather than having the maintenance plan. Perhaps, they weren’t interested in this potentially sub-par deal for them. I assured them this was not the case. I also inquired, legitimately, if a three thousand dollar printer was small potatoes for them. I was told it was not.
Finally able to get in touch with a sales rep I was told I would be emailed a quote.
Two days go by.
In the shower this morning I planned to make hourly calls to each of the numbers I had been given to FORCE Ricoh Sales to let me buy a printer from them.
However, before enacting this plan, I was given a call. I was told that because we had purchased our other printer from a reseller, Ricoh would not sell me a printer.
Just glad to finally receive a call, I thanked the Ricoh Sales associate.
I went to my co-worker’s office to tell him the exciting conclusion of my Ricoh dealings. He had a very different take on things.
“That is absurd,” I paraphrased on my blog, “That is like buying a Mac at Best Buy and then wanting to buy something from the Apple store and being told ‘No you are locked into buying from Best Buy.'”
I argued for the integrity Ricoh has with their resellers. However, he totally had me. He was totally in the right to call Ricoh Sales the absolute worst in customer service. I could no longer argue against the fact that dealing with them was one of the worst of my professional career.
However, I hadn’t planned on writing about this at all. Instead, I wanted to tell you about this guy I used to work with. I hit him up on messenger recently asking about a way to display the address of your closest store in Magento (which if anyone has something on that it would be appreciated). We continued chatting and he told me about how well he is doing (financially but also his work situation was infinitely better than his last job). But what was even better was learning his story of how he got to where he is now.
In the course of 10 years, he went from poverty to selling himself as a cheap IT solution and now he is where he is at. It was cool to see how just applying yourself to a goal will pay off. It is an amazing time we live in.
