Brett Kelly

1. The anticipation of an evening out with my lady celebrating our 9th wedding anniversary (tomorrow night).
2. That said lady and I decided that anniversary gifts are off the table this year because neither of us could think of anything cool to give.
3. There’s a new episode of The Talk Show.
4. There’s a new episode of Macbreak Weekly.
5. The Hold Steady
6. How great it is that I get do a super cool job from my own house using sweet Apple equipment and almost never wear shoes.
7. The great big impromptu hugs I just got from my kids.
8. My Field Notes band of rubber.

This was exactly what we’d wanted to hear. Anybody who has purchased an inkjet printer recently knows that the reason the printer itself is so inexpensive is that the manufacturer gets to regularly take you to the cleaners when it’s time to refill your ink cartridges. This seemed like a pretty sweet deal and, knowing that Costco generally does a stellar job of offering legitimate deals to their customers, we felt we’d found our printer and wouldn’t be forced to take a bath on ink refills. Wrong. A few days ago, the printer started bitching that the black cartridge was running low and needed to be replaced. This made sense, since I’d printed several copies of my ebook in preceding weeks for my friends to proofread. It wasn’t a huge deal since I was safe in the knowledge that Costco would refill my cartridges for a fraction of what it would cost to replace them. This afternoon, I yanked the mostly-empty cartridges from my printer, kissed Joana on the cheek and drove down the street to Costco. I hopped in line at the Photo center where they also do the ink refills, made my way to the front and plopped them down on the counter. I told the young guy behind the counter that I needed to get them refilled and, before I had fully removed the from the bag in which I’d carried them, was told “We don’t refill those.” I had seen a sign as I walked up that said something about the refill service only being available at select locations, so I asked, “This particular location doesn’t refill these? Or Costco doesn’t?” Turns out, no Costco will service these cartridges. That I bought from Costco. Which were made by HP. Which is one of the three manufacturers enumerated on the sign offering inkjet refills. You can understand my frustration, particularly given the fact that the sign didn’t say “some HP cartridges”. So, I’m a little miffed. I bought that printer from Costco in large part because I thought that ink refills would be inexpensive. Since this isn’t the case, my next course of action is to return the printer that I’ve used for the last 3 months and for which I no longer have the packaging. Costco lets you do that. I’m told.