So, there was a US soldier in Iraq who was annoyed that Hewlett Packard’s customer support didn’t extend to telling him how to fix his scanner/printer (probably because it was beyond warranty, and most likely because it wasn’t designed to function in deserts).
What does a solider with time on his hands do while he’s busy ‘defending freedom’? He makes a video of himself complaining about the printer, then using some very heavy artillery to shoot it.
I’m not really interested in the HP printer side of this video, what makes me link to it is just how damn awful the guy’s aim is. He’s standing from around 5 metres away from the printer and doesn’t manage to hit it for the first twenty shots. Fortunately for him, one of the bullets hits the barrel that the printer is sitting on, knocking it over, which makes it look slightly more like he can shoot straight, but his pattern is clearly leaning to the right of the target. In the next shot he fires another 20-or-so rounds at the printer and it looks like he hits with one or two bullets.
If there was ever a video to give confidence to Iraqi insurgents then it’s this. Not only is the US army allowing their soldiers to use high-calibre weaponry in an enitrely pointless, and moderately dangerous way (no eye protection when firing into a non-organic target five metres away?), but the guy couldn’t hit the side of a barn from arm’s reach. He might as well be handing out pamphlets for all the good his use of military hardware is doing… Oh… Maybe that’s what the printer was for?
That is actually pretty scary, although as we are well aware, a british soldier would have killed it in one shot. Oh yes indeedy.
The British soldier would have tried negotiating with it, offered it a cup of tea, then asked the Americans whether they could stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ against the tyranical oppresion if HP support policy.
I suspect the American army would then have sent in a missile strike that destroyed the printer, the British solider, and a nearby goat herder. When asked to comment, Tony Blair would do his ‘my face says sorry so I don’t have to say it on record’ expression, then he would explain that ‘inevitably there will be tragic losses involved in system change’.