It's puzzling why the printer industry has to be so abusive and has always been customer hostile. I mean, it's nothing new, printer companies have been awful since at least the 70s... printer problems are what inspired Stallman to start GNU after all. Are there any printer companies not like this? Is Brother still decent?

All companies are trying to give up on real customer support (because there is no competition and US is a pretty corrupt country). Self-service support is fine for a free open source project, it's not acceptable for a paid product.

I assume these numbers change you for the pleasure of being on hold - wouldn't it be illegal to artificially add 15 minutes of wasted time onto the bill?

This while thing feels like a Onion article.