This is a true story about an outstanding experience with mobile printing.
The story starts in late December 2010 when amidst tons of snow I was called out to leave Germany on a business trip to the United States. The way there had already been as difficult as it could have been with three cancelled planes, many hours spent in service desk queues and far too many delayed trains to Amsterdam which should have been my stopover, resulting in me going two days later than expected, ending with a lost suitcase and no clothes to change into after arrival.
After what I would tend to call an adventure to get to the US, I ended up traveling back on the 23rd of December with my plane leaving and landing in Amsterdam for the planned stopover – only to find my onward flight back home and to the family for Christmas was cancelled. In fact all inner European flights had been cancelled for that day and Christmas eve wasn’t looking any better.
What was I to do? How would I get home in time to celebrate Christmas with the family? Whilst still in the security area I could overhear people talking about mile-long queues at the train ticket desks and the queues at the airline service desk did not look any more promising. There was only a minor chance that I could take off the same day to make it home in time so I decided to be smart and try to book a train ticket online. Surprisingly enough there were still seats available on the train home and it was taking off in less than an hour.
However the train operators were apparently still living in the stone age and required me to print off the train ticket – for heaven’s sake, a printer is not something that is included as part of our office mobile kits! Wandering around the security area sure there were enough shops that had a printer and I had asked about 10 employees in different shops to print something off for me, which all denied without exception – mainly due to restrictions or security concerns.
Literally as I was walking out of the security area to go and try my luck traveling without a “regular” ticket, a shining angel appeared in the form of a little box with a printer attached. We had just recently taken the mobile printing solution from PrinterOn on board as part of our product portfolio and this little box looked too familiar! It was fairly obvious what I needed to do, as the email address was written in large shiny letter just above the printer, so all I did was get out my smartphone and forward the email with the ticket that I had booked to the email address written on the printer. I would have loved to see my own face when the service replied within seconds, telling me that my print job was waiting and I should retrieve it using my privacy code. I walked up to the printer, entered my little code and only seconds later I was holding the train ticket home right in my hands.
The story ends with me arriving home just in time for spending Christmas with the family, which PrinterOn and their mobile printing services played a big part. I must say that I am grateful that the people at PrinterOn have developed such a flexible and easy to use product and so is my family!
This story was written by Thomas Herold, Sales Engineer/Product Manager HSIA at Acentic GmbH.
