Three Little Words

We just bought a brand new printer from HP. I figure we buy about one printer every two months or so, on account of my husband’s business which involves printing out hundreds of photos each month. So we know from printers.

As it happened, we were enjoying a weekend at our house in Truckee, where we go to be near, but not actually at, the ski areas. My husband suddenly decided that he needed to print something out, and he tried to connect his fairly new laptop to one of the four (count ‘em) fairly old printers we had up there. As it turned out, even the newest of our old printers did not possess a USB port. So it was off to Reno, and Best Buy.

Our first impulse was to seek out the least expensive device that would print, photocopy, and fax (not that we ever fax anything). But we were drawn, as if by printer gravity, to the latest HP model, which was advertised as “wireless network ready.”

The salesperson, who was an HP employee, was very knowledgeable. This came as something of a shock, since we frequently shop at Fry’s. Anyway, she explained all the features of the printer; especially the ink cartridges that for reasons unknown cost much less than other ink cartridges, and the tray for photo paper that is able to coexist with the regular paper tray.

Then I asked about the “wireless network ready” claim. Just how ready is this printer, I wanted to know. Do I have to connect it to a computer to configure it, or will it find the network on its own? You see, we didn’t want to buy a USB cable if we didn’t absolutely have to, because though we were ready to spend $300.00 on a printer, we wished to avoid spending $20.00 on a cable when we knew we had a couple dozen spare USB cables back in Palo Alto.

The salesperson did not pretend to know the answer to this question — another culture shock for us. She led us to a second salesperson who, she said, could explain the wireless setup.

This salesperson explained the setup using special rapid high-tech salestalk that sounds like “Yada yada yada configure yada yada yada automatic yada yada yada no problem.” And then he uttered those three little words:

It Should Work.

Hey! I wanted to yell. Come on now! I am a trained technical writer. I have more than 20 years of experience writing end-user documentation. I know the uses of the phrase, “It Should Work.”

I held my tongue, though, figuring I’d probably already embarrassed my husband enough by interrogating not one but two salespeople. We gambled (this was Reno, after all) and took the printer home, cable-less.

It Did Work.

The simple setup instructions that came with the printer let us through typing in the encryption key for our home network, and both our computers — one Mac and one Windows — found the printer immediately.

Good work, HP! Be sure to give credit to the instructional designers who came up with those setup instructions. And remember, tell your salespeople not to use those three little words.