Sunday, January 13, 2013

7:15 a.m. 7-11 on Zhongshan Road in Taipei

The daily weather report remains unchanged: cold and very wet. I lay in bed listening to the rain all night long and it is still raining now. It is the type of rain that clearly has no intention of stopping.

Yesterday turned into a day of errands. My main task for the day was to open a bank account at a second bank back in Canada. I had been looking into this for a while, and it didn’t seem possible. It was at least very complicated. All the banks required a visit to an actual branch to do the final paperwork and to sign papers. Even if you started the process online or over the phone, you eventually had to go to the bank in person. Perhaps things have changed recently because when I went to the website of my bank of choice, there was now an option to open an account without a bank visit. I went over the details many times to make sure I had it straight, and I think I did have it straight. It looked to be possible to do everything online. At some point, the bank has to mail something – like a bank card and PIN number – to your address in Canada, but that’s no problem. This material can always be forwarded.

The key to the whole online process is to have a working printer attached to your computer. You have to be able to print out the official application form that pops up during the online process. If you select the option that says there is no printer attached to that computer, then you are thrown back to the original procedure which requires a branch visit. (I didn’t realize it at the time, but you don’t, in fact, have to have a working printer attached. It’s possible to save the file at the end and then print it out from another computer. But I didn’t know that. I thought it was an automated process.)

I do have a printer for my computer, but I hadn’t used it in a long time, mainly because the ink cartridge was empty. Ink cartridges are expensive, and I didn’t want to waste the money on a replacement. This bank account is important to me, though, and I figured I might as well get it done this weekend and so, I went off in search of an ink cartridge.

This leads me to the theme of the day – and perhaps a theme of my life in general. I talked about this with my brother the other day. The general theme is that no matter what I’m looking for or trying to do, the particular thing that I need is always the one that is impossible to do or get. It happens ALL the time. A store will have every model of something you can imagine except for the model I want. They will offer every color in the world except the one color I want. A place will have opening hours except for the one day and hour that I want. It always goes like that. I have begun to suspect that there is some kind of evil power hovering above me that figures out what it is I want or need and then ensures that it is unavailable.

That’s nonsense, of course. It implies that I have bad luck, and even a cursory look at my life shows that I have quite good luck. Things do work out and have worked out. This theme probably has more to do with attitude and is likely the result of being a pessimist. Still, it’s hard to shake this feeling, and yesterday fit the pattern.

I have a Lexmark Z650 printer – your basic inkjet printer. There are also several electronics stores just up the street from me, and I figured it would be easy to get the inkjet cartridge. I removed the cartridges from my printer so that I could show people what I needed. I walked to the first store – a huge 3C. They had an extensive display of inkjet cartridges. And they had every cartridge you could possibly want, assuming your printer was an HP, an Epson, and a half dozen others. The cartridge for a Lexmark Z600 series printer? Sorry, out of stock. They literally had every cartridge in the universe except the exact one that fit my printer. I went across the street to the other big store. Same thing. Tons and tons of ink cartridges for every printer imaginable – except mine.

I had been hoping to avoid it, but I saw that I had no choice but to go downtown to the big computers and electronics district. That area is jammed with people on the weekend and it’s never pleasant to go there. But I had no choice, and I walked there. It will be no surprise that I could not find my inkjet cartridge there either. Store after store after store after store all with big displays of Epson and HP and other brands of inkjet cartridges. But nothing for a Lexmark. Finally, deep in a sub-basement, I found a little stall where a man could help me. Even he didn’t carry any Lexmark inkjet cartridges. BUT he did have a recycled cartridge from some other brand that could fit into a Lexmark. I wasn’t sure I could trust him on this, but at this point I was desperate and I forked over the NT$490 for the recycled cartridge. It was as I was leaving that I saw I was surrounded by booths that offered an ink refill service! I probably could have had my ink cartridge refilled for NT$100. I hadn’t even thought about that. I’d tried to do that myself in the past, and it never worked out well. However, for printing out just one or two pieces of paper, it would have been fine.

As a side note to this story, I should mention that I also needed paper. This story is even more silly and embarrassing. The thing is that I had actually had a big ream of printer paper. I’d purchased a ream a while back and it had been sitting on my bookshelf forever. I would use a piece of paper from it from time to time, but it was still pretty much full. Then in the last couple of months as I’ve been packing and getting organized, I wanted to clear my bookshelves and make some room, and I decided to get rid of that paper. I never needed it. So I just threw it into my knapsack and brought it to work and left it at the photocopier – essentially donating it to the company. Now I suddenly needed paper and I was in the stupid position of having to buy paper. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t find printer paper anywhere. Look as I might, I couldn’t find any. I remembered seeing some bundles of paper at the 3C I had been to first. I had made a mental note of them because they were small bundles of 25 or 50 pages, not the giant reams of 500. So, even though going to this 3C would mean another long hard walk, I figured I might as well go back there and buy this paper. At least I knew for sure that they carried it. I walked all the way back to this store and when I got there I was annoyed to see that this paper was all photo paper! It wasn’t regular printer paper. Sure, I could buy just 25 pages of it, but it was for printing pictures and it was super expensive. Ironically, this store did have actual printer paper – reams of 500 sheets, and the exact same brand and package that I had purchased before and just donated to the company.

The typical Doug-ness of this whole situation lies in the financial angle. I was opening this bank account with a second bank largely because my current bank has very high ATM fees. It would cost a lot of money to withdraw money overseas. This other bank has much lower fees. So I’m trying to save money on bank fees. Yet, to open this bank account, I had now spent NT$490 on ink and NT$130 on paper. That would cover a lot of bank fees right there, and I haven’t mailed the various documents back and forth yet – that will cost more money. It’s still worth it, though. Having an account at this second bank will mean not just lower fees but also the security of having a backup. If I have trouble withdrawing money from one bank, I can always try the second one. Then I won’t be stuck.

The story is far from over, though. I’d like to say it was over, but it wasn’t. I went back to my apartment, installed the ink cartridge. It seemed to fit. I tried to print out a test paper and found that Microsoft Word had no listing for that printer. It has been so long since I used that printer that I guess I had done a complete reformat and reinstall of my computer system since then and had never gotten around to re-installing the printer. I had to think for a bit about how to do that. There is an option in Microsoft Word to add another printer. To do that, you have to find it on your system. I selected those options, and I got one of those horrible “bong” noises and a big error message about the directory service being unavailable. I never seem to run out of the error messages that a computer can deliver. Two hours later, I was still trying to figure out what this error message meant and how to fix it. However, no matter how much searching I did online – and there were thousands and thousands of references to this error message – I did not manage to fix it on my computer. I did everything I could think of and everything that everyone suggested, but my printer just sat there inert. My computer could not be made aware of it through any program or in any way.

As part of this process, I had gone to the Lexmark website and downloaded the printer driver for this printer. That was no problem. It’s a Zip file and you unzip it and everything gets copied into the right place. That didn’t help either. However, it’s a standard strategy to simply redo everything when dealing with computers. You never know what will happen. So I had already rebooted my computer a few times to see if that would change anything. I had opened and closed the software, turned the printer off and on, plugged and unplugged the printer at various times – all trying to nudge the computer in the right direction. I even tried downloading a bunch of different printer drivers – the website gives you a set of options. Nothing happened. It was very frustrating. Then, on total impulse, I decided to download and unzip the original printer driver a second time. Who knows why? I just did it. And for no reason that I can even guess at, when I unzipped the file this time, it automatically started an executable install and setup file. It hadn’t done that before. So suddenly I was going though an install and setup procedure. And when that was done, everything was fine. The printer was installed on the computer and Microsoft Word now listed it. I held my breath as I did a test printout, and to my relief the printer sprang to life and started to print. The document was very light and somewhat fuzzy, but it was there.

I was exhausted by this point and hardly trusted myself to now go to the bank’s website and work my way through the application process, but after a cup of coffee and a short break, I went to the website and went slowly through the process. This is something you don’t want to get wrong. I read everything I was supposed to read and filled in everything I was supposed to fill in and made sure everything matched and was consistent and then clicked on the final “submit” button. My application was sent to the bank over the Internet, and I was presented with a paper that I was supposed to print out and sign and physically mail. Oddly enough, there was no “print” icon anywhere on the page. These sorts of things are usually automated, but this one wasn’t. I was simply presented with a regular web page with the instructions to print it out. I wasn’t sure how to do that, but I simply right-clicked on the page and selected the “print” option. With a few experiments, I managed to get it to print out right. That’s when I realized that I could have just saved this page and then printed it out from any computer. I could have saved myself a lot of money and time, but I didn’t know that. In the past, when I’d done similar things, the printing was done automatically and directly. There were security precautions in place to prevent you from doing it again and again. If it failed the first time, it was game over. So I had good reasons to make sure everything worked first.

 

Tags: Canada, HP, Microsoft Word, NT