Dave Donaldson

Over the holidays (Christmas Eve to be precise) our dryer crapped out. This posed a bit of a problem because it happened late at night, Christmas was the next day, we were going out of town, and we knew we wouldn't be able to get someone to look at it until Monday or Tuesday. So we went 3 days without a dryer, which was OK because we didn't have much time to do laundry anyway, but once Monday came around, we needed to get back at it (2 adults and 3 children is a lot of dirty clothes over 3 days, not to mention all the new clothes from Christmas that needed washed).

So we had someone come look at it and it was going to cost us a couple hundred bucks to fix it (motor was shot). Screw that I said because I'll take that money and put it towards a new one (at least we got several good years out of it). Then my wife reminded me that we got $250 in gift cards to Lowes for Christmas from my family, so I did a quick search on the Lowes web site for dryers and found some nice ones for the right price. So last night (also our anniversary) we went and had dinner and then went to Lowes to buy a new dryer. Found a nice Whirlpool for a good price and thought we were good to go.

But wait a minute the Lowes dude said, you need to the electric dryer wire kit. Huh? Apparently, dryers do not come with the wiring to actually plug the thing in so you can use it; you have to buy that separately. So let me get this straight. I spend quite a bit of money on a major appliance and it doesn't even come with its own plug? Correct. Granted, the kit only costs $15, but I mean, seriously, why is that not included? Yes, we used our gift cards for the purchase and the whole thing only cost us $17 of our own money, but it's the principal of the whole thing.

Any of this sound familiar to the tech industry? Come on, it's obvious. I'll wait a second. OK, time's up: printers!

Can anyone at HP, Epson, Lexmark, Cannon, Xerox, etc, etc tell me why in the hell when I buy a new printer I have to separately purchase a printer cable? Why the f*ck don't printers come with a printer cable? Am I missing something obvious here? I mean, every printer cable I've ever bought has been EXACTLY THE SAME as the previous one. It's a complete scam. A ripoff. Makes me sick. And the part of this scam that pisses me off the most is not the fact that I have to pay a little more money for the cable, but it's because I usually forget that I need to get a damn printer cable as an extra purchase and have to go back to the store to get it before I can use the printer, thus costing me at least another hour of my life. Why not just include the printer cable with the printer, add the cost of the cable to the cost of the printer, and make us all happy? Is that really that hard? Dumbasses.

OK, damn, I feel much better. Needed to get that out there. Whew.