Scott Grieder, Ask.com Group Product Manager, was taking notes on an important conference call when his (free) Google Pen ran out of ink without warning. The lapse in this fundamental Google product/service forced him to switch pens at a critical moment, resulting in considerable inconvenience and loss of data.

“I should have known better than to use a free Google product for business purposes.” Scott told us in a recent interview. “Google Pen is fine for home use, but not when my company’s productivity is on the line. I had to switch pens in the middle of taking notes. There’s no telling how much data I lost.”

But then he received a nice handwritten letter from a Google person. “We note your suboptimal experience with our Google pens”, it said, “and are pleased to send you — at no charge — a replacement set. Fortunately our pen architecture is based on Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Drafting Stuff [warning: embedded geek joke] . If any component fails, a quick recovery is ensured”.

Thanks to James Cridland for spotting it.