optilude

Given that it’s the year 2007, you’d think companies would’ve cottoned on to a few cliched, cheesy, unbelievable and outright silly things that they shouldn’t try to market themselves with. I guess not. I don’t think I’m the only one who feels turned off by a company which uses one or more of these techniques:

• Taglines like Your main supplier of … or Your experts in …. Seriously, I’ve not heard about you before. You’re not my anything.
• Anything involving an explamation mark.
• Anything involving more than one explamation mark.
• Anything involving an exclamation mark and a question mark next to each other.
• Other grammatical atrocities, such as using numbers as phonetic replacements for words, or trying to spell things phonetically. JooToobe anyone?
  
• Pictures of attractive women with headsets waiting to take your call. Call centre operators are, by and large, not very attractive, and in any event I wouldn’t be able to see them. This argument counts doubly for the kind of companies that advertise exclusively in London telephone booths.
• Other images which were obviously purchased as stock photos.
• Pseudo-diversity. I used to work for someone who had a stock photo of a black hand shaking a white one. They also had one black employee. It wasn’t his hand.
• Anyone who insists on getting an email address (or worse, a contact number) before possibly divulging the price of something.
• Gyms.
• Over-use of superlatives or claims to being a silver bullet for whatever problem. I would come up with an example, but the most superb example I know of comes from Tom Wait’s Step Right Up.
• Websites which look like this. Bonus for the dancing robot though.
• Websites which don’t work in Firefox and/or Safari. “But most of the world uses Internet Explorer” is just a pathetic excuse these days.
• Companies or products which attempt to speak to customers in the first person. “Hi, I’m your friendly supplier of …” or “let me give you a hand with that”. The UK tax return is like that, and it’s damned irritating. Of course, I wouldn’t trust the taxman anyway.

Oh well. Enough procrastination for a while, back to work.

In the series on rants…

Most days, someone will pop up at the Plone mailing lists, chat room or in my inbox saying something like “I tried to do X, but it didn’t work.”

It may be irrational, but this annoys me so much I want to be rude to them. They took the time to  ask for help, and then they included no useful information to help anyone help them. It’s doubly annoying if they’re talking about software I wrote or documentation I provided, since it implies there’s a problem with it, but gives me no chance of fixing it (or defending it, as it may be).

So, the next time something doesn’t work, ban the phrase “doesn’t work” from your vocabulary and think:

• What exactly did you do (be specific, i.e. break it down into steps)
• What did you expect to happen?
• What happened instead?
• Did you get an error? If so, describe it and supply any error messages

This isn’t terribly difficult and won’t take you very long, and it will get your issue resolved much, much quicker and gain you more respect.

Phew (again).