Never Take Allan to Office Depot

We have been having a printer problem. We thought we'd be smart and buy a nifty all-in-one printer/fax/copier for the new office. Allan went out last week and came back with a Cannon of some sort. It looked fine to start with, but the big hiccup was that it wasn't network ready. After messing around with the printer and the LinkSys print server for a few days, we finally decided to thrown in the towel and return the thing to Office Depot.

So, Allan and I trudged over there and hauled it back. I have to say, the girl at Office Depot working the register was great. She accepted everything back with no issues. We told her we wanted to return the Canon and buy something else instead. She said that was fine and told us to pick out what we wanted. We found a network ready HP color laser model and brought the pick-up tag to the front. She promptly dispatched a stock boy to bring it out. Meanwhile, Allan and I were waiting.

So, Allan sees a new Lenovo laptop sitting over at a display by the register. We walk over and he starts talking about this anti-virus, rollback feature that Lenovo/IBM supposedly build into these things. He starts dinking around with the keyboard, just generally killing time. Then he decides to fiddle around with the USB port, pulling what he thought was a mouse or something from it. Well, it turns out that Office Depot has a theft alarm system that uses USB that they plug into each of their display laptops so that they don't walk off (they are also mechanically bolted down). Anyway, about a nano-second after Allan pulls this USB cable from the machine, there is an ear-splitting alarm that starts going off. The girl at the register is rolling her eyes and I'm looking sheepish. Everybody in the store is looking our direction. The manager finally had to come over and disable the alarm. It look about 5 minutes, during which Allan and I tried to look not-guilty. I don't think it worked.

Moral of the story: Don't take Allan to Office Depot.