Social media - HP doing it right

Prolific and stylish blogger Anna Raccoon was lamenting her experiences trying to get an HP printer to talk to her Mac, an experience comparable with deciphering Linear-A:

I've spoken to 17 different technical gurus, and a few extra at Apple. Every one of them paid the minimum rate for whichever country they were in, everyone of them believing they are doing a decent days work, and every one of them utterly useless.

Let me say that this is not 1000 miles from my own experience trying to get an HP laser to talk to my Apple hardware - it's about 50% reliable on wireless connecting at best, and 100% on USB connection but only if connected before a reboot. So you should think seriously about whether wrestling with HP drivers is really what you want to do, though the printer hardware itself seems pretty good and has held up well.

But what's this? Not a day later, HP contact Anna out of the blue:

I’ve just had a charming gentleman, Keith Schneider from 'Executive Customer Relations' (sounds good anyway!), on the phone from sunny California, who assures me that they will produce a French HP Laserjet expert with perfect English who will phone me at home within 24 hours and sort the problem...

Wow. Given California is 9 hours behind France, and so Mr. Schneider only got to work about 5 hours ago if he's an early riser, that's not bad going. Keith Schneider, if you're reading this, you should give a bonus to the social media trawler who spotted this blog post, realised its importance and escalated to you. It's raised HP several notches in my eyes, and I assume many others.

Now if you could do something about the semi-trained baboons who write your drivers, I'd be even happier.