Prior to being a part of our marketing team, I had the opportunity to work exclusively in the field training our graphic arts customers in color calibration, Fiery print controllers, and color profiling. In my travels back to the marketing and design departments, I’d often pass by the office’s traditional copier fleets. While my job was to primarily work with the graphic artists, their co-workers were creative in their own right when it came to operating their equipment.

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My favorite memory was the day I spent an afternoon training a company’s in-house print shop manager on a new color system they had purchased. As I walked into the shop, I assessed the fleet and noticed a fairly new multifunctional printer (MFP) from us in the back with a large yellow sign taped to one of the drawers that read, “Don’t use. This drawer doesn’t work!” I immediately asked the customer if there was something wrong with what to me looked like fairly new equipment.

“Oh no, we just got that,” he happily replied and headed over to the machine we were to train on.

“So what about the sign?” I asked, “Do you have a service call in on it?”

He replied, “Oh no! That drawer just doesn’t work, so I just put a sign on it so no one uses it.”

I couldn’t stop grinning and had to know more. We walked over to the machine with the drawer that “didn’t work” and started talking about what was going wrong. The customer revealed that the drawer was notorious for jamming and simply became more trouble than it was worth. I examined the drawer, all of which appeared to be in tact, and gave a brief operating overview. At this point, I suspected that the issue was merely a paper weight issue. The drawer, that to the customer was completely useless, was actually enhanced compared to the other two below it, and had the ability to handle heavy card stock, which traditionally is better fed through the bypass tray. The caveat—the drawer had a small dial on the front that had to be turned to the appropriate paper weight when you loaded the paper. A dial that, from what I could assess, was completely foreign to my customer and his co-workers. We took a few more minutes going over the machine, sent a few test prints, and promptly balled up the yellow sign and tossed it in the recycling bin.

While I no longer work on the field side, I think about this customer from time to time, especially when I myself am baffled by some new high tech gadget. How many other people out there have yellow signs on their equipment or simply stop using something because they can’t get it to work? And, how is it that something that is new can cripple us in such a way that we accept it as it is?

The bottom line is, more often than not, if something doesn’t work, especially when it comes to Advance equipment, you have a right as our customer to have it remedied. More so, one of the unique things about Advance is that our people truly love what they do, and that passion carries through to you in our service and support.

We tackle these sorts of occurrences in several ways—be it a quick phone call, a face to face follow-up training session with one of our field trainers, or a service appointment with one of our technicians to ensure operability. So the next time you consider settling, whatever the equipment—MFP, fax, document management and more; give us a call. We may just save you some time…and a piece of paper.