Paper clips? Huh? What are those?

Posted on December 17, 2003 by Gene

Is there anyone who knows less about office supplies than the employees of an office supply chain? Ask if they have computer backup tapes, and they scratch their head. Then, ask for a DLT tape cartridge, and the blank stares remind one of a lobotomized goat. Repeat your request, and you’ll realize that not only do they not know what you are talking about, they don’t even speak English.
I gave up and ordered the DLT cartridges from the Staples website, which promised to deliver today. It also admonished me to fill out a driver release form and tape it to my front door in case I wasn’t home.
Guess what? The driver didn’t leave the package. A call to an unhelpful Staples employee revealed that he “might have thought it wasn’t safe.”
I do not live in a slum, an inner city, or a high traffic apartment building. I live in a townhouse in a safe and relatively affluent suburb of Washington, DC. And I am pretty certain that people aren’t in the habit of stealing DLT tape cartridges to feed that drug habit, even though they are pretty pricey as tape goes.
I needed those tapes today. (Actually, I needed them several days ago, but they’re not carried in stores.) The practical upshot of all this is that there’s yet another delay in getting the tapes to the DVD replicator for my friend Sara’s DVD project — the first set of tapes had errors, and it proved impossible to find new tapes to replace them.
May I suggest that, if at all possible, you avoid shopping at Staples or Office Depot until they get around to hiring some employees who actually give a damn about the industry in which they work.