With moving from continent to continent all kinds of things come to surface. We brought most of our stuff with us from Estonia to use here in Calgary. Some work without a power conversion, some work slow and some don’t work at all. For example I had to buy a new hair dryer because the European one was blowing only feeble air when connected to 110v instead of 220v. We also ordered a voltage converter for our kettle. Some lamps needed the converters as well, but most stuff was ok – the scanner did not work, but the printer did. Until we ran out of ink.

After trying to buy the ink at the store and finding out that the printers in Canada use different ink cartridges, I went online to find where I can buy the ink for an European printer. Turns out I cannot. Amazon will not ship it to me and neither will some of the stores that I tried to order it from in Estonia. In the end I called Canon and asked them if they can ship it to me, but they said they cannot either.

In order to prevent people from ordering things from wherever it is cheaper, the companies have come up with a clever system indeed – they sell different models in different countries. The Canon representative told me that even the printers in the US are different than the ones in Canada. I can imagine that the justification is that the needs are different in each country or other good marketing excuse, but the real gist of the story is that every country wants to control the prices. If I cannot buy ink for my printer from Estonia unless I am there, then I need to buy it in the country I am in. But since the local ink does not fit the foreign printer (same maker, same functionality), then I also need to buy a printer. Very clever indeed!