To: The Silhouette support team

Re: Their damn machine

 

Dear folks,

In the past you have tried to be very helpful and I greatly appreciate your patience. It is in deference to that patience and your wonderful attitudes that I am going to refrain from using every curse word I ever learned listening to my father work on the car right now. However, enough is enough. And I am calling it enough.

With our last communication, I had told you that after calibrating this Silhouette Cameo, serial number T312A299141, was behaving. Maybe it’s because I tend to take a couple of days between cuts, but that was then and this is my first attempt at cutting anything a little while after that. And once again, it’s simply not behaving.

I have been all over the internet, shaken my head at your manual, looked at your website, and even struck up conversations with perfect strangers that endorse your machine in my various attempts to get it to work correctly. I have followed your advice. I have done all I could.

I don’t want to empty my settings anymore, or uninstall programs, try Make the Cut, calibrate, or do any of those things any more. Because they’re flat out not working. I am attaching a picture of how well your machine cuts for me. As you can see, it at least cuts the paper. It doesn’t cut where it’s supposed to. I realize now it’s just not going to.

It doesn’t matter if the paper is thick, thin, shiny, metallic, matte, glossy, small, or large. I have tried them all. Typically when I try to cut one simple page of 1 inch to 1.5 inch stickers, it literally takes me all day to get a sheet that isn’t slashed by your machine’s blade. ALL DAY.

The first problem to this, by the way, costs me valuable work time and thus money because I work at home. While I’m fighting the machine to get a simple set of stickers I’m setting other commissions aside.

This is how my process goes. I set up my page. I print it. I send it to your machine. Your machine sometimes refuses to register no matter what I do. Sometimes it will be in the middle of registrating and suddenly stop with a horrible sound. Sometimes it will go through the process entirely and then make that sound and fail registration. Almost always it makes that sound about 3/4 down a standard sized piece of paper.

I have to watch the cut. Sometimes it will start out sort of close and then halfway down it won’t be close at all. Sometimes it will not start out close at all. Less and less common, to the point of being more and more uncommon, it will get a page right. I haven’t had a correct page in a very long time.

I have to register and start a cut dozens of times. Each time it cuts in a different place.

Britny, who works with your help department and was very very friendly and leaped through hoops to reach me, had explained to me that the fact your cutter is a paper waster is a fact of life. To avoid overloading your little machine, I had to keep the amount of data in my cut very low. She told me to never change the default setting on the registration marks (which makes it rather pointless for you to have it so they can be changed). And of course I already knew not to go past the hash marks.

I just cut the amount of stickers on a sheet I normally do to 1/3. That’s about 12 stickers at 1/5 inches high. The photo you see is of my fifth attempt to cut them.

I have even went so far as to put a single sticker in the middle of the page without any success.

I have made sure it is in good lighting. Cleaned it. Made sure I hit “load cutting mat” when loading. Cleaned the blades. Blew out the dust. Kept the cutting files ridiculously low and unproductive. Not changed the default settings. I probably would have rocked it to sleep if that would have helped.

Now, if you please, I’d like you go to http://www.sheet-labels.com/ and take a look at the prices. These are the sheets your machine are destroying. This is how much money it is costing me, and that’s not counting the replacement mat, extra blade, pens I’ll never be able to use, and other paper from the craft store.

The important point that has gotten overlooked time and again throughout this drama is that your machine worked perfectly in the beginning. I could cut some serious sticker sheets with it. Now with each file I’m limited more and more. There’s something seriously wrong with that even Captain Kirk could see.  Sure I had a slight learning curve, but I already knew what I was doing from the OTHER Cameo I used to own. I sent that other Cameo back because it wouldn’t cut what I needed and your company was very gracious. This is something else. Your machine is BREAKING if not already broken. With each and every cut the problem just gets worse and worse. I don’t appreciate that this is being overlooked. Do you expect me to demand my money back? How on earth could I do that when I bought it at Michael’s? No the most I can do is make my dissatisfaction very well known.

Your machine does not work. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, because selling it to an unsuspecting person would be WRONG. But it doesn’t work. It USED to work and *THAT IS THE POINT*.

I could have sent the money spent on this thing as a partial payment to my car or my house. We could have bought food. Or changed the oil in our car. I was very unsure about buying this machine – call it a bad feeling – but was talked into it. I wanted to hold out for a silver bullet, which comes with a business warranty and cuts what I need to cut. But I was a fool and listened to the elements around me that wanted me to settle for less. You should never settle for less.

All I want to do is make some charms and a few paperdolls. I’ve been wanting to make these charms for over five years now. With the hundreds of dollars your machine has cost me, I could have had at least a few of them MADE in a way that would look a billion times more professional.

I really have no way to sum up what I say in a good manner. So thank you for your time.

Katrina