u/AkbarDelPiombo

My HP Color LaserJet 477fdw tells me there's a paper jam. I've done everything I can think of — opened the back door to look for shreds that might be occluding a sensor; spraying the roller with compressed air; unpluggings/repluggings; examining the duplexing mechanism... So I can't print, or scan, or copy, or—

I'm at wit's end. Grateful for anyone who might suggest next steps, other than an angry trip to the recycling center.

Thanks in advance.

...Al Pacino stands outside a Brooklyn bank shouting "Sciatica! Sciatica!"

I’ll be going to Saint Paul de Vence this fall, spending a couple of days at the Fondacion Maeght. Grateful for a hotel recommendation or two — have never found TripAdvisor and the like particularly useful. Merci infiniment.

I have often stayed at the Skyview Motel in Los Alamos.  Last week I made a reservation for a $429 room.  I had assumed that I was reserving directly with the motel, but as it turns out, the link I clicked was via booking.com/guestservices.com. Certainly: my mistake, clicking on a sponsored link rather than scrolling down to the hotel site itself.

• There was, a charge for the room, $419, which was appropriate.

• There was, additionally, a $63.92 "tax recovery charge," of 14% state tax plus $3 service charge.  This, too, is appropriate. But then:

• At checkout, there was an additional $128 fee tacked on by booking.com.

This is, according to them, to cover sales taxes, use taxes, occupancy taxes, room taxes, excise taxes, values added taxes or other similar taxes that were not completely taken care of by the "tax recovery charge." But in truth: there are no sales taxes, use taxes, occupancy taxes, room taxes, excise taxes, values added taxes or other similar taxes that were not completely taken care of by the $63.92 "tax recovery charge."

As I paid and agreed to the TOS, it seems I have no recourse. The telephone customer support promised a call to me from a supervisor. That call never arrived. My email correspondence with Customer Care yields only boilerplate responses.

I ask not a legal question but a question of good business practice and client service: do you think it fair for booking.com to charge $128 more for a room than a direct booking via the hotel's own site?  For the same room and same conditions and same amenities?  An upcharge of approximately 30% with no value added?

How many other booking.com or guestservices.com clients simply assume that this surcharge is both inevitable and justified, when it is simply an act of greed?

And does anyone here have any suggestions for navigating booking.com's customer care in a way that produces something other than promised callbacks that don't arrive, or boilerplate responses that are disingenuous at best and factually false? What I'm looking for here: a way of threading a maze which seems designed to produce frustration, and which disregards basic tenets of client relations.

Thanks in advance.

Tirami Sue

His dad was in the pen and he didn't know how long the sentence was.

I keep my Tesla 3 charged to 80%. When I left home yesterday I drove to a nearby restaurant, roughly 4.9 miles away. As I gave my car to the valet I glanced at the display: down to 78% which is more than normal. When I got the car back: 51%.

I highly doubt that the valets took it for a joy ride — particularly considering they didn't know how long I'd be at the venue.

Tesla Support hive mind: any thoughts as to what might have happened during my 1h45m separation from my car that might have caused the battery to lose so much charge?

Thanks in advance.

There’s the CD; the ‘24kt’ CD; the from-DSD CD; and the 96/24 digital file that I know of. (There may be more.)

Which do you prefer, especially for those of us for whom the gold standard is the Claudia Cardinale-era LP?

Thanks!