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From:  j4 |
Date:
December 14th, 2004 04:05 am (UTC)
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Re: hmmm...
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They want a page which can be opened via Adobe, or they want a page whose content can be viewed directly on the Web.
They (and I, thank you) know what a PDF is; we put 100s of PDFs up on the web for this content provider. Usually they just say something like "please put this PDF on the web" which is fine & makes perfect sense. It's the saving it in the spreadsheet that makes no sense. The thing they're asking for is something that should be part of a regular update process, & shouldn't require any clarification by now; without wanting to explain the whole situation in detail (because it's unutterably dull), the spreadsheet in question is a mechanism for automatically updating some pages -- they send us new spreadsheets, we run a conversion script on them, & hey presto! - we have HTML. They've put links to pages on the web (both HTML and PDF) in this spreadsheet before and that's fine, the script is set up to deal with that. It's a process that they should be used to. Clearly they're having some sort of problem with this bit of the process this time, but really, it's not clear what the problem is.
Question techniques which tend to work with these types are
... absolutely no use when their reaction to that sort of super-simple question is to get more irate & send even more incoherent replies with more exclamation marks in. They think they're asking as clearly as possible for very simple things which I should be able to do in seconds; they get frustrated when I ask questions which they regard as patronising (this person is, after all, higher up the ladder than I am though in a different department...).
The thing is, they're not technologically clueless -- they create the PDFs, they know as much as they need to know about HTML (which let's face it isn't much) and 'how the web works', yet they persistently fail to communicate helpfully on email. (They're slightly better on the phone, but they're also always 'too busy' for phonecalls.) Requests for simple updates (where all that's really needed is the URL, the original text/link/etc. & the replacement text/link/etc.) come in such garbled form that I struggle to untangle them. This is probably a simple update, and I've asked a couple of questions which should only require yes/no answers, and now am getting silence. It's a pattern that keeps on repeating with this person; and in about a week's time I'll get an email saying "SEE BELOW THIS STILL NOT DONE AND NOW URGENT!!!! THANSK", with their boss and mine copied in, but still no further clarification. Fortunately by then I'll be on holiday & it'll be someone else's problem.
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