Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Two things:
"No Time."
"Can't be bothered."
Nobody reads anything. I've seen people installing software using a guide I wrote, and then got complaints that it doesn't work. Turns out they only read the first few words of a sentence, or the list of software and install it, keeping all the default configurations, and they skip all the "If you... then...", and "set X in file Y" parts.
Some people you also can't ask anything. The answer will always be:
"No time.... have to run...."
or:
"I don't know..."
IMHO, it's a matter of priority. Everybody thinks he's so darn important that HE doesn't have to read and/or follow instructions, or can't be bothered to look stuff up or even understand it. Other, lesser people can do that, and if possible, without having to pay them.
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Yes, exactly this. Have a new-to-me client. Sent me craploads of friendly emails, over the last n months. Small job, dollar- and work-wise. Fine. We set him up in production, and he complains about the length of the instructions. (sigh). Send him the ebooks, and here's the thing--in the SAME breath in which he complains that he's having panic attacks, about having to upload the ebooks to Amazon, mind you, which is a few clicks, he complains about how the 60 pages of "instructions" (more on that in a moment) are too much, and oh, yeah, he should have done the coding for his books himself.
WTF? I mean, WTF? you are worried about uploading completed, ready-to-go eBooks, to Amazon, but
you think you could have coded them YOURSELF??? What freaking universe are you in?
THEN, what
really torqued my ass was, with his bitching about the page counts, on the downloadable PDFs, is that
he never looked at them. It's NOT "60 pages of instructions,' that idiot. They're
60 screenshots, that show our clients everything from how to put the file into Kindle Previewer (and/or Adobe Digital editions for PC users for ePUBS), how to change the font size, how to change the devices, how to nav the TOC, and more importantly, from our standpoint,
the basics of eBooks, like "there aren't any running headers, no page numbers, no widows or orphans, this is what happens when text reflows" and so on.
The
POINT is to save people a lot of time and effort--and
mine, too--filling out proof forms with all the "mistakes" we made, like "putting a header at the bottom of a page," because they don't undersstand eBooks. So, each page of the PDF is a screenshot, with basically a caption that's one-three lines, saying something like "when you increase the font size, a line has fewer characters, and the screen has fewer lines per page. This means that that heading you see at the "bottom" of the screen, in one font size, on one device, will be completely different for a different person reading the book, and completely different for you, the moment you change the font size."
Why do we have this? Because,
if we don't tell them, I waste hours and hours of time, each week, explaining to folks that the 50 mistakes that they listed in their proof form don't actually exist, or aren't mistakes, etc. They get upset and
angry about all the mistakes, invest god-knows-how-much-time filling out proof forms, and then
I get to waste about an hour, sometimes two, taking screenshots of how the book changes when you do X with the font, etc. and telling them that it's all fine. Who needs that???
Not me.
So I invested
all this damn time in making the PDFs, to HELP PEOPLE. And this (*&^%$#@ is sitting there complaining about them, having not opened them, not looked at them, and in the same breath basically saying "this is overkill, and I shouldn't have to look at this, but I don't know how to upload my book to Amazon. BUT, bygod,
I DO NOT NEED SO MANY INSTRUCTIONS." Really? You can't do something as incredibly simple, as uploading a completed file, to a system designed for the uber-non-tecchie, but
you KNOW that our instructions are "too much?" WTF?
Mind you--we say, in about 3 places, that we don't provide Tech Support. That people are supposed to know all this, BEFORE they contract us--and none do. So, do I just say "go use Google?" NO. I take the time to help them. And then I get
this asshat?
90% of the people who come to us
have never even SEEN an eBook, up close and personal. Virtually 99% of them don't know how to download files from browsers. They don't know how to sideload a file to a device, and they don't even understand that if you don't have a program on your computer, that will run a given file type, you're SOL. Given that, yeah, right--I created "too many" instructions. Because people think that they should just be able to click-and-go. Not KNOW anything. Not LEEARN anything.
It's simply flat-out infuriating, it really is. If this guy were a one-off, fine, I'd blow it off, but he's not. I feel like the definition of insanity, over and over and over, and NOTHING works with these people.
NOTHING.
Hitch aka
