I think I’ve mentioned before that the Empire has a grand and continuing Problem with making driver CDs for out-of-production Empirical systems available to customers who need them for one reason or another, and how much of a pain it is to have to burn them by hand and overnight them manually to the customers (our current best stopgap solution). I believe it’s a need that will never ever go away, and I’m a member of a team that is looking for a better way to meet the need.
Today, after a con-call meeting last week about ways and means, one of the White Hats in the Product group sent several of us part of an email someone had sent him, questioning why we are looking for ways to send physical media of the driver CDs to customers when All Right-Thinking Computer Manufacturers Should Force Their Customers to Download All the Drivers, Every Time. This imbecile said
“I would like for this team to map out a new policy that teaches consumer customers how to fish. Dispatching a CD should be the very last resort. Can customers go to their nearest kiosk, library, friend, relative and download drivers? They can and they should . . . not only does it prevent a dispatch, they will get their drivers sooner, the drivers will be more up to date/targeted to their platform, and they will be less likely to call us the next time they need them.”
(The correct answer, kiddies, is “we’ve been pushing exactly that solution for the last two years and it’s failed spectacularly because customers don’t BEHAVE that way.”) Our Lab Queen, the person who’s actually having to MAKE all these custom-burned CDs for Auric and case-escalation customers, answered
“Ideally, yes, but this is failing on the push thus far. People just seem to feel safer with the physical media. We all know they should be using the latest drivers on the web, and still we have this many requests.”
I was so annoyed by the effrontery of anyone still seriously propounding “let them eat downloads” that I went a lot further. I wrote the following back to everyone originally in the email exchange, and added copies to my outgoing great-grandboss, my incoming great-grandboss, and my great-great-grandboss. (I figured I don’t have to worry about copying great-great-great-grandboss; if g-g-gboss thinks he needs to see it, g-g-gboss will make sure he does.)
I’m seconding S___, and I’m very angry to find that, at this stage of the process, we still have some people involved with this project who are so completely OFFboard and antagonistic to fixing the issue we’re trying to fix. I will point out again (and AGAIN and again and again) that the our target audiences for the issue of replacement driver CDs for legacy systems—indeed, for any system—are the home user, the small business user, and the remote-location corporate user. Any of them is more likely than not to be unable, either through lack of spare working systems, lack of technical knowledge, or lack of dedicated IT support staff, to be able to download most-current drivers from the Web in some usable form, and most particularly so in the case of an OS reinstall or hard drive failure, where the very thing that’s broken is what we’re telling them to use to fix their issues.
Saying “we should teach customers to fish” becomes a nugacity, and indeed an insolence, when the customer’s only pole is broken in two and his line is tangled round a branch. (That old saw serves as such a blanket excuse for shirking work that I wish it had never been said.) The customer with a broken system does not WANT a course in systems maintenance, he wants a working computer, and he perceives our divagations into “what we think customers should know how to do” as blaming the victim.
And “oh, we want our customers only to use the very latest drivers available” plays as a red herring when said to a home or small business customer. They generally don’t CARE whether they have the latest drivers. They care whether MS Word and Excel will open and whether Internet Explorer will pull up their Yahoo mail accounts, and if older-rev drivers installed from a drivers CD can make that happen, they’re happy with it.
I will also say again, and I say it from three years’ experience as a customer-facing front-line tech, that our continued insistence on forcing customers into Do-It-Yourself to get drivers and utilities they need, balking at every step in the replacement-media process, is causing unending bad customer experience, and our dissatisfied customers get great pleasure from using it as an effective stick to beat us with, spreading as far as they can that “the Empire doesn’t care anything about helping their customers.” And you know what? When I sit in their seats and look at it, they have a great big point! Their script runs “The Empire was all about selling me a computer, but after they got the money from me—pssh! When I needed help with it they tried to nickel-and-dime their way out of doing anything more than they were absolutely forced to, and I had to scream continuously for days to get them to do what they should have done without having to be told.” Our choices are making life harder for our home and small business customers, they naturally resent the daylights out of it, and they tell anyone who will listen. And these days, there are a LOT of anyones who are listening.
About an hour later, Incoming g-gboss copied me on an email he sent to the product group White Hat saying “let’s you and me sit down together and talk about who’s spouting this kind of crap and figure out what we should do about it.” Not long after that, Outgoing g-gboss stopped by to tell me that his Word for Today was now “nugacity.” He didn’t know what it meant, and when he went to Merriam-Webster’s Web site to look it up, M-W said “Ooooooooohhhhhhhhh . . . that’s one of our PREMIUM words, and we’ll only tell you what it means if you buy a subscription from our online service!” He declined to subscribe and went Somewhere Else Instead to look up what it meant.
 
A solemn yoke stuck therapy like a mo-fo. Fnord.
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