“Lee Wei, you bought the wrong ink cartridge,” I pressed the COMPOSE button in gmail, and started typing furiously.
My recently graduated senior gave me a printer. He put it at church before he left London. Two weeks ago, I carried the printer back. Up and down the stairs, I carried the box from Queen’s Park to Paddington, and then to Gloucester Road.
“It’s just a one-way trip. Thank goodness.” I thought to myself.
Yet it wasn’t so smooth. At home, when I plugged in all the cables and got ready to test the printer, I realized that there was no ink cartridge inside the printer. Well, fortunately, my senior was kind enough to leave me some back-up ink cartridges too. So last Sunday, I brought them back.
However, the ink cartridges don’t match! I have HP 300XL Black and Color at hand. But the printer, a HP deskjet 3822 requires 78 Color and 15 Black. This is very uncommon. My brain started to reason quickly. My senior, as a single poor university student, should only have one printer. As a result, he should have only purchased ink cartridges for his only printer. So by right, his left over ink cartridges should match his printer. Now, the fact that the ink cartridges don’t match the printer is a clear indication that he bought the wrong ink cartridges!
This is not entirely impossible for my senior who has weird wiring in his powerful brain. He has no qualms about exchanging his almost brand new iPhone 4 for a HTC phone with a church friend. Not to mention the time he sold his iPod touch thinking he had no use of one, but only found himself buying it back on eBay months later. “I really wanted to play that game! Let me show you how cool it is!” He justified himself as such.
The mismatched ink cartridges could well be bought for his experiments with machines of all sorts of models, I guess. Yet, he had raised my expectation by misleading me to believe that he had left me with extra ink cartridges. Now he had crushed my expectation. I was disappointed. This mistake was unforgivable! How can someone just graduated with a first class honors degree in Computer Science gave me wrong ink cartridges! This is most unacceptable!
I pressed SEND with utter confidence. Thus began the email exchanges. Here are some snippets.
I think you bought the wrong ink cartridges…
The two new ones you gave me are 300XL… but your printer requires 78 for color and 15 for black…
You didn’t look at the specification before you bought right? ><
What should I do with the 300XL ink cartridges then? Return to you in easter? give them away?
Hi,
Indeed the correct ink cartridges for model ‘HP DeskJet 3822’ are 78/color, 15/black, as you’ve indicated.
…
Then I tried to figure out why I bought 300XL ink catridges in the first place by searching the internet, and the model ‘HP Photosmart C4780‘ (information derived from here @ http://www.internet-ink.co.uk/hp/hp-ink-cartridges-300xl-colour-original) seemed very familiar to me (I’ve since also deleted the printers from Google Cloud Print and my Macbook’s Printers, so I can’t verify). Are you sure that that’s not the model of the 3-in-1 that I’ve left you? If this is indeed correct, then the HP 300XL cartridges is the correct one for that 3-in-1 model.
I’m really not sure myself, I think you might actually be right, and that might be the ink cartridges for the printer I have at home in Singapore now - if this is correct, then I’ll come get it from you next Easter. At work now, so I can’t check till I get back. Sorry if this is the case.
Not sure if you’ve already opened the cartridges to try and install it, but I remember there was still some color/black ink left, so the printer should be able to last for a little while longer.
Hi,
I’ve checked my printers at home, and the HP one is ‘HP Photosmart C6180’, so I didn’t get it mixed up with this one.
Am I then mistaken that it’s not HP Photosmart C4780 that I left you?
meh… you left HP Deskjet 3822 :)
mmm, but I’m quite sure the printer I left looks like this:
rather than this:
and there’s even the remains (like when you don’t peel off a sticker properly and the sticky stuff is left behind) on the display where you control the printer with the touch buttons on both sides of the screen.
Did you put the printer underneath the laundry basket?
If yes, that means i brought back the WRONG printer! >< saddddd!
I knew there is sth underneath the laundry basket but not sure what it is….
And there is no left over ink cartridge inside the printer i brought back… What a mistake!!!
yes, i think you must have brought back the wrong one. who does the printer belong to. yay! exercise…
T_T help me carry it back…
So much to my contentment of the one-way carrying trip. The bubble bursted. And I ended up sharing how blur I had been on facebook, so as not to make the owner of the HP deskjet 3822 worry.
Well, the next trip to church will be good exercise indeed. Pray for strength to return the WRONG printer, and to carry the RIGHT printer back.
