As you all know, I recently moved to Japan. Thanks to the wonders of a professional relocation service, I pretty brought most of my computer related gear with me (minus my huge VM server that is now being housed in Drew’s datacenter – his garage).
Anyhow, one of the items that I brought was my trusty multi-functional Canon MP530. It’s only about year or so old and it just didn’t feel right leaving it behind. Well, it just finally ran out of ink. So last week, I trekked down to a denki-ya-san in Shibuya to purchase me some more ink cartridges. Being that this printer was manufactured by Canon, a Japanese company, I didn’t think finding the cartridges would be an issue.
Needless to say, it was an issue. I spent 10 minutes looking through all the Canon cartridges not seeing any what worked with my printer model. Next, I asked a sales associate where the cartridges would be for an MP530. Interestingly enough, he seemed surprised and told me he hadn’t heard of that model number. I explained that the printer was purchased in America. Sadly, he then stated that the cartridges for my model might not be sold in Japan, and that none of the cartridges they had would work.
A little peeved, I returned home to verify this. First, I went to amazon.co.jp, and surely enough, the MP530 was nonexistent. However, there are cartridges that are very similar to mine which can be found here: Link. After seeing this, I then came up with a bright idea. Let’s just order the cartridges from amazon.com. They are sure to have it, and yes they did as shown here: Link.
However, there was just one problem. Amazon didn’t like my Tokyo shipping address:
*** We’re sorry. This item can’t be shipped to your selected destination. You may either change the shipping address or delete the item from your order by changing its quantity to 0 and clicking the update button below. ( See geographical restrictions.) ***
Great! Just one more item on my ever growing list which is subject to regional lockout! What is wrong with companies? Don’t they realize that hurting the consumer either makes them not want their products or worse… forces them to do bad and evil things! We live in a global world and it is now 2009.
If you like this, check out some other posts from Tyson:
- PowerShell boy and the case of the missing cmdlets!
- Fun with PowerShell 2.0 Eventing!
- Creating a custom 404 page to handle link redirection for ASP.NET web applications
- Microsoft Discontinues Support for Windows 3.X (as an embedded system)
- Kyoto Temple Night View – Powered By Google!
- My quest for SSH within PowerShell revisited!
Or if you want, you can also check out some of Tyson’s latest publications:
- Windows PowerShell Unleashed (2nd Edition)
- Windows Server 2008 Unleashed (Yes, I did help on this book)
Lastly, visit the Microsoft Subnet for more news, blogs, and opinions from around the Internet. Or, sign up for the bi-weekly Microsoft newsletter. (Click on News/Microsoft News Alert)
