Maybe it’s just me, but lately I’m noticing a lot of laziness around me. Laziness and, if I’m honest, half-assed work. Details going unnoticed, pieces missing and work not complete.
This might not be making any sense to you, so here are some pretty pictures that might help. Taken from the roof of a very swank hotel in a very swank city in Arizona. Look at the first pic closely and I’ll continue to tell you what I’m on about.
Nice right? Colors match, the fire gives that feeling of warmth and comfort and the flowers help to soften the hard edges. At first glance it looks amazing. Until you notice the details.
The yellow circles show off some very not-blending-in chrome table legs that look like they came from a desk chair about the same time this particular hotel was built. Top left is a cable that is coming from the fire pit, presumably to light it, running someplace. We’ll ignore that one for now since it’s not as glaring as shiny chrome.
I’ve been told not to sweat the details in the past, but I always ignored it. I’m going to tell you why.
The details make a difference.
You see in our example above, if the table cloths were bright red, or if the fireplace wasn’t lit, then seeing the table legs would probably be perfectly a-ok. It would appear, however, that a great deal of work went into the planning and decoration of this particular space for this event. Allowing the table legs, at least to me, while a minor detail, is one that takes this otherwise great looking scene down a notch or 5.
It’s just half-assed.
If you are going to do something half-assed, don’t be half-assed about it. Be consistent. Rip a table cloth, break some glass, forget to sweep. Consistency is key.
If you are going to spend the time, effort and money on making something truly kick ass, then make sure it is, in fact, truly kick ass. Mind the details. Cover those crappy looking table legs. Give the glass a final polish to make sure there aren’t any spots. Sweep the floor.
When the details are missed is usually when it is the most noticeable. Go for perfection or go for half-assed, just don’t do them both at the same time. It makes you look bad.
I’m having a pretty good week so far if I can be so bold. Nice and busy, but not crazy busy. Just about perfect. Perfect except for 1 thing. It may seem minor to some of you, but it is making me absolutely batshit crazy.
Everyone one of my customers this week have had printer problems. Every one of the printers was an HP. And every one of them took me no less than 2 hours to complete if it would even complete at all.
Whiskey tango foxtrot, over?
Let’s start with the size of the basic driver download for a PC (Windows, all versions, all bits). For most of these downloads the file size was a compressed 205MB or larger. I had 2 of these drivers, uncompressed, that weighed in at 1.5GB. Gigabytes people. For basic drivers.
Next up was the installation. On a brand new and fairly buff Windows 7 machine, one of those drivers took almost 8 minutes to install and required a reboot. The longest of the printer driver installs was 45 minutes. Yes, you read that correctly. Almost 1 hour to install a printer. Sure it was XP. Sure it was a Celeron processor. Sure it only had 1GB of shared RAM. Is that an excuse? When I can install video drivers on that same machine in less than 5 minutes? No, it’s not.
Maybe I’m too old school in my thinking. I remember when a driver was nothing more than a few .inf files, maybe a .dll or two. Fit on a floppy disk and installed in just a few minutes. I guess that is no longer the case. Or, probably more like it, HP is getting lazy and/or Microsoft is making them include a but of crap that isn’t even needed but they think it is.
If you are looking for what the problem with Windows is gang, just look at the printer division of HP. Bloated software that performs poorly and clogs the system with files and features that aren’t needed or required.
I know I am repeating myself, but printers are nothing but a waste of time, energy and money. I went paperless a few years ago on everything that doesn’t require my signature, perhaps you should encourage your users to start doing the same thing.
This one is dedicated to every HR person, every over thinker, every person that fancied themselves, at one time or another, a designer.
Or to the web developers that have never heard of a Mac, a browser other than Internet Explorer and still think Front page is a cool thing to use.
Or to the architects. Wherever you are.
Please take a minute the next time you create something that one of your customers, potential employees or anyone in the general public could possibly interact with and let someone else look at it before you pull the trigger making it live.
Please.
You HR people. I understand there are rules and that you need a ton of information when an applicant applies for a job. I do. How about making the process make sense? How about paying a designer with some idea of user experience planning to design the forms for you? How about a little beta testing to make sure that the forms work?
You that build large corporate websites used for support and to serve customers other important information (verizon.net, I’m looking directly at you). Why not follow the links you create to make sure they go somewhere? Again, beta test that cool new feature of the site to make sure it works before rolling it out to the general public. And, hey? Why not take a few minutes to add a little consistency to your entire web presence?
Finally, you architects. I realize that you don’t always get to see your projects to completion. Still, why not visit a property you designed to make sure ‘it works’ correctly and things are easy to get to and find. Essentially, test the navigation. See how fucked up it is and take that back to your drawing table to make things better. Make sure to account for trees and parking structures if they aren’t already in place.
Through the course of each and every one of my days I’m constantly coming across things that could have be fantastically awesome if only someone would have taken a little bit of extra time and planning to make sure it worked correctly. To make sure the navigation was consistent. To ensure that it looked cool, no matter how it was viewed.
I’m less than a genius. I’m also the first person to admit that I’m not always the smartest person in the room. But I do know how stuff should work. Sometimes I can even do something about the stuff that you made to make it work the way it should.
Anyway, I would really appreciate it and owe you a solid if you could do something to help me out here. Just stop making things that suck.
You rule, as always!
xoxo
db
Dear Internet,
For you among us that take advantage of services provided by in-house IT staff, friendly neighborhood kid or myself. These are things that, no matter how hard you try, how loud you scream or how long you argue, are not our fault.
That said, when you do have one of the above listed issues, or anything else wrong with your PC or Mac, don’t be gettin’ all butt-hurt when we tell you how much it is going to cost to fix it. Parts cost money. Windows licenses cost money. MS Office costs money. Please don’t ask us to ‘hook you up’ with a free copy of Windows or Office. We can get in big trouble for that.
And, our time is valuable. If all we did was help people for free, then we would not be able to have nice things like food or electricity or cell phones that you call us on when you can’t print because you didn’t turn the printer on. We aren’t going to charge you for a 30 second phone call, but a hearty thank you is always nice, or even a cup of coffee. Something to acknowledge some appreciation.
Finally, and we’ve discussed this before, don’t question our answers to your questions. You have the problem, you came to us about the problem, we give you a solution for your problem, done. If you don’t like our answer, call someone else. Don’t continue to insult us by pretending you know anything because you “heard about it on the radio” or “saw it on the news last night”.
Of all of the tasks you do, taking care of computers is not one of them. That’s why we exist. We are here to help. Please try to keep that in mind next time you are looking to blame someone because your hard drive crashed.
As always, thank you for your time.
xoxox
Don
I’m a fan of Twitter. You guys know this already. I mean, I’ve been using it since it was an Odeo product about 5 years ago. You could say that with Twitter, I was a very early adopter.
Most of the time I find it helpful, entertaining and quite informative. The nice folks that I follow usually share quality items that interest me or say funny shit that makes me giggle.
That said, there are times when I absolutely fucking hate Twitter. Hate that burns with the heat of 1,000 suns friends. Hate that would turn the average person green with rage.
Yesterday (and I’m sure today) was one of those times.
You see, for those of you that are living under a rock on one of Saturn’s moons, the new Apple Telephone Device was being delivered yesterday. And all 408 of the people that follow me got one. And all 408 of the people that got one did nothing but fill my Twitter feed with post after post after post about the line, the phone, how great Apple is and how the device has changed their lives.
All day. Nothing but ATP posts.
Here’s the thing. While I’m sure the device is awesome and made from rainbows and pure unicorn fur, when all I have to read on Twitter is nerdgasm after god damned nerdgasm about it gets a little old. I even unfollowed a few people yesterday because of it.
I get your excited. Awesome! I get that you are in puffy pink heart love with the damned thing. Hooray! I get that you want to gay marry Steve Jobs and bare his puffy pink heart love child. I do, really. You are really excited. Good for you.
I, however, don’t care.
So, you can expect more Android news and retweets in my twitter feed. As long as you guys are going to do it to me, I’m just going to do it back.
And enough with the FourSquare. I don’t care where you are or how many others are there with you. If I did care, I would follow you within the FourSquare app (yes, I’m there, search for me). I for realz don’t want that crap in my stream any more.
As always, thank you for your time.
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