never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It
signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy
#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing
The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.
how dare you say we put jam in the printer
Ok reblogging this again because story time.
I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.
There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.
So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than “(software) is broken, help”
So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she’s trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there’s an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.
The error message basically says, “these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save.”
So I take a few deep breaths.
Then I lie to her.
I message her back, saying “hey yeah, for some reason it’s not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?”
She does.
I ask her if she still needs help.
She does not respond.
Part of me wants to laugh at this person as much as anyone
But there’s also a part of me that has worked in office jobs for long enough to know about the ubiquity of “this whole workplace is jury-rigged together with chewing gum and duct tape, only loosely following the manufacturer’s intentions for literally any of our hardware or software… and therefore if you follow the instructions given in a manual or by a built-in error message, it will maybe 40% of the time trigger some type of complete disaster, and only certain employees know which times these are, so you HAVE to ask them to make sure this isn’t one of the exceptions before you obey any Official Instructions that you see anywhere. But of course if it turns out not to be one of the exceptions, then they’ll yell at you for being stupid. Have fun! :)”