Posts by Terry 6

Re: Should be outlawed...

A fun version of this is with the two major greetings cards companies (maybe others too).

A little offer at the bottom of the order screen "Do you want £xx pounds off your next order?"

Who wouldn't. In tiny print it is enrolling you in some monthly rolling payment scheme for some entirely different thing.

Re: Masks don't do anything

I don't think anyone would argue with that, other than the rabid anti-maskers. (See social media posts of Piers Corbyn and his crew). But in fact the broad detail is enough- masks do make a difference.

Re: Masks don't do anything

The anti-mask anti-vaxx idiots use arguments like "a mask isn't fine enough to stop viruses only a (whatever) mask will work". They have a host of these superficially reasonable arguments. But they're all subtly distorted straw man arguments. Sure a mask won't block a virus particle-no one said it does- but it does block the spray that the virus travels in.

if you find out what happened

Not a FTFY because if you're on here you presumably would. Eventually. An ordinary user - no chance.

I know this because the first time I fixed this for one of my users I spent several hours trying to find out what the problem was and only got the answer by incidentally seeing a reference to "wifi switch" in an unconnected forum thread. (Someone wanting to buy a replacement for a stuck switch or something of the sort - it was a long time ago). But it was the clue I needed.

Re: Forums

I think you need to be a bit cautious on that one. Far too often when I seek an answer from a forum the initial search will sound like the problem I have. But the actual question will turn out to be entirely different.

Something along the lines of Thingamajig Widget keeps timing out

But the actual problem turns out to be Ever since I took all the components out of my PC and polished them I find that......etc

OK I exaggerate but you get the idea.

No it isn't. Mostly it will be that your user will have managed to catch the fn key and wifi button at the same time or the almost invisible wifi switch. Because they ( and often we) use point and peck typing and often miss, and/or use two hands on keys at almost the same time. But they will have had no idea that they've done this- or even that they could.

Re: Similar problem with a moped

to admire the view,

Err, starting with the car in drive might not have been the best of things, if you'd have been able to, tbh.

(Why's there no falling off a cliff icon?)

Re: "first read the fine forum thread until the end"

I'm getting rusty on these things, but if my memory serves correctly USB connections have fractional symmetry. So that it requires a rotation of >180 degrees to turn them over and => 720 to return them.

well formed FAQ document

Unfortunately, most FAQ web pages seem to be written before the item was even sold. Answering questions no one ever asked and with answers that are either blindingly obvious or too convoluted to help, missing the key issue in verbiage written to promote the item

Your ABC Super Widgit comes with advance de-grommiting controls in the anterior apex to help deswazzelise the vertigial mond-switcher

Yeah but that still doesn't explain how to find the manual "on" switch if the remote isn't working.

Re: Intelligent websites?

Sounded right though.

Re: Despising the company/customer loyalty

I'm kind of guessing that there are targets for gaining new punters, so these are heavily pursued. That's the marketing dept's fishing pond. But not so much, if at all, for retaining them. That's customer support and is a cost centre.

It would fit with my experience of Virgin. I'm on a rolling month-by-month ISP/Landline/TV package. 200Mb.

I'd like the faster 1Gb internet of their new packages. They'd like me on a contract. But not enough to offer me a package anything like as good as they offer new customers. Currently I'm still with them because I've not found anything I like better and they've not pissed me off enough for me to jump ship. Yet. because I am pretty pissed off with that attitude.

And I've always been pretty happy with VM- my service has been full speed and mostly reliable. But the attitude- and the way they try to confuse matters with bullshit promises and complicated packages that make VFM impossible to determine does really annoy me. They used to be OK with customer service. Until they were bought by Global or whatever they're called. Now their attitude is like that of a vampire to a blood transfusion centre.

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

Wow, she got around a bit..

( preferred this image of her from that link https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.reddit.com%2Fr%2FDamnthatsinteresting%2Fcomments%2Fayxvz3%2Fmost_famous_stock_photo_model_rebecca_givens%2F%3Flimit%3D500&psig=AOvVaw1o1qmkWMiTk23ikxKQjOcm&ust=1639920742925000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=2ahUKEwiQyoD8uu30AhVdgM4BHU00AQIQr4kDegQIARBP )

I know bloody well the chatbot can't deal with anything that isn't bog-standard. Or that some dickhead in a marketing department thought that the users ought to want to know about.

Re: I'm not so old that I can't scroll downwards without assistance

This is merely the follow on from the charmless "charms" in Win 8. Key controls concealed somewhere near the corner of the screen so that you had limited chance of finding the damned things when you needed them ( a little game of "Hunt the Thimble" anyone?) But would pop into sight at the wrong moment if you happened to make an incautious movement with the mouse.

Re: HSBC France

This seems to be a universal issue. Company A is the worst in the world, until you try B so you go to C.....and so on until back to A.

Re: Intelligent websites?

It's the "we're experiencing unusually high volumes of call at the moment" that puts me in phone throwing mood. As in, it's in the middle of the morning, in the middle of the week, in the middle of the month. If you can't handle the call volume now you never* can you lying bastards.

*And yes, you do always get that message- any time, in any day in any week.

Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?

Cement. I should be s lucky.

I'm trying to buy a new multifunction home scanner/printer to replace my trusty, now ageing, Pixma TS6150. Which does all I need, as would have its successors, I gather, until recently. When they replaced them with- something different.

Should be easy, yeah?

Not any f***ing more it isn't. All the printer companies' web pages tell you everything you don't need to know- written from the marketing dept's perspective, who all seem to think that their machines will be used to print from mobile phones to only 1 type and size of paper, on only one side, mostly by people who don't care about the cost of ink.

Stuff I need to know; is there a second place to put paper, can it double side, even how many ink cartridges it takes and what size they are is hidden away in small print at the arse end of three links. You have to do this individually for every sodding printer you think might be the one you need.And, despite this being their sales pages they provide no help whatsoever to help get you though the morass. Even the dratted "help" pages give no guidance. And the chat bots boot you back to the generic sales page. Grrr

Re: Another important ERP project going off the rails before even going live

That rings a bell. I seem to remember, at the start of various projects, hearing (and hearing of ) senior officers lauding all the wonderful things that some project will be able to do. But when a given project is actually in use none of these benefits seem to be available.

Even silly little things. It still annoys me after maybe 20 years that they put in loads of networkable photocopiers that would have saved us lots of money on inkjets and made doing our jobs a teeny bit easier. But ours wasn't networked - and we ( and teams like ours) with lots of little individual printers would be the ones that would have benefited. Someone told our manager they would be going to do this to us, she being pretty clueless just let them and didn't tell anyone. I spent months, even years, trying to get this sorted out. When I finally got agreement it was nearer the end of that contract, we discovered they hadn't even put a network card in the machine- and that since it was now obsolete they couldn't get one.

Re: Another important ERP project going off the rails before even going live

Another ( a common theme of mine, I know) is possibility that the people who pay the bills haven't a clue what the staff who use the tech actually do, with the tech or even in the wider jobs.

Re: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

Exactly that. "Unthinkable" means, at best, that they are convinced that they've covered every possibility. It doesn't mean that they have covered every possibility.

Re: The chicken or the egg?

That sounds a bit like me- though I can teach ( and demonstrate) writing correctly formed letters using either hand. It's the actual writing of more than one or two words where it all falls apart. The formation is correct - but consistency of size, position and curvature is all over the shop. And after any prolonged period of writing everything starts to get illegible. I tend to write right handed because some bloody stupid teacher 60 odd years ago forced me to. Which in a sense was partly the foundation of my career, since I spent much of the last 40 years sorting out kids' reading and writing problems. Many of the latter caused by stupid teaching in the early years - and a fair chunk of the former too for that matter.

I'm ambidextrous, but in general there aren't many jobs I can choose to do with either hand, there's always a preference. I've never been able to find any discernible pattern to why I use any particular one though- other than if I was clearly taught it that way. So, I tend to catch or pick things up left handed. Clean my teeth and shave right handed. And so on.

Re: Out in the sticks

Err I live in North London. Bloody foxes are everywhere.

Re: Where are the instructions?

My swimming/life saving teacher said much the same thing. If you see someone drowning the first thing to do is take off some clothes.

Re: Last place...

no consultation/discussion with the development teams to find out what they were doing/needed/required

Replace the word "development " with the name of any front line or production team, from researchers to cleaners and you will have the standard outsourcing problem. No one setting up an outsourcing contract ever seems to actually find out what the people doing the job, or relying on it actually do/need

For example, They would have no idea about the fact that the cleaning team in a certain building need to allow for the extra time it requires to, say, clean a special surface used to protect violent kids from harming themselves. Or that they schedule certain rooms to be done later because there is one area that is often used for late child protection meetings when kids are taken into care.

Or they set up a window cleaning contract and don't factor in that one set of windows gets unusually high amounts of muck from a nearby main road and takes longer to do.

Or most egregious, a piece of multidisciplinary reporting software outsourced by the senior managers of a service who use certain kinds of jargon and procedures to a company they have used internally to develop reporting documents, but no one among them actually asks the partner agencies how they work, or whether the terms used mean the same to them. A classic version of this was that they littered the shared database with prompt questions to help structure the multi-team information gathering . But they didn't speak to anyone outside of the commissioning agency, not even their own staff who''d worked alongside them for a while. Which meant that to the other agencies many of the words they used meant something totally different. So the online form didn't seem to make any sense and never seemed to offer the prompt questions for them to provide their evidence.

I wonder if they're like the crop of educational management qualifications that were floating around ( as in unflushable) a few years back.

Lots of books on management style and corporate groups that were borrowed from both Organisational Psychology, where they took theory into practice without passing it through reality and those books that were written out of the belief that the author has some mystical understanding of running an organisation because they'd done well ( but without anyone questioning why they'd done well, whether other organisations that had done well used the same methods etc. But above all were built on the assumption that all you needed was to be devious and manipulative while dressing it up to sound as if it was enlightened management

Re: Let's be honest here

I'm guessing the biggest group will be the ones it just happens to. i e. Ordinary users in SOHO set ups.