Apathy & Support

Recently I found myself thinking about the 'Apathy' Demotivator.

There is a software that I use to convert video so that it is podcast friendly. The software had an update available for download. To get the update I had to login to the product's support site via a login form (choose product from drop down list, enter email address and registration code from my purchase email).

I typed my information into the form, but could not get logged in. I tried copying this info from the original email the company sent with my purchase. No change. I still could not get in.

I sent an email to their support group that told them them the nature of my problem. I explained what I chose from their drop-down list of products and what I had tried, including both copying & pasting and typing my info into their form and that neither had worked. And what did I get for my efforts? A canned response telling me to "try copying & pasting the information".

Now if their support rep had actually read my email, he/she would not have responded this way. It is possible that canned response emails solve a portion of a company's support requests, but I just cannot agree with this being their first course of action for support. It just leaves me feeling that my questions and concerns are not important to the company.

I did ultimately get this issue resolved after a few days, but I have to say that I actually liked their product a bit more before I had to deal with their support group. I may be overreacting here, but this is my human interaction with their company and I expected a bit more. I am left feeling less likely to recommend their product.

Email Pet Peeve

A decent portion of the email that I receive is definitely spam, but there are some fringe candidates in my Inbox as well. Often these borderline emails are sent from folks that are legitimately trying to market something to me. As there are email marketing companies out there that are actually concerned about the quantity of spam-flagged emails that are sent from their clients, I always look for an opt-out option before reaching for the spam button.

If I make a web purchase, I sometimes opt-in for future emails. When I receive too much email, I go back and opt-out...easy enough. Occasionally a company decides that I am going to be interested in receiving email from one of their partners and subscribes me to that company's emails. I am not a fan of this, but if there is an opportunity to click an "unsubscribe" link I am not too upset by it.

What I really do not like is when a company shares my email address with a partner that does not give me the option of opting-out. Often they want to force me to create an account on their website so that I can opt-out of receiving future emails. This always leaves me wondering why in the world they would think that I would want create an account when I am already less than please with them for contacting me to begin with?

Printing from Acrobat Pro 8.1

I recently purchased and installed a copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0 (well, 8.1). I have been mostly pleased with this application, but while using it I have discovered that I have a new pet peeve.

When I go to print a document from Acrobat, a Print window is displayed and there are a number of choices that I can make regarding my print job. The vast majority of the time I am just looking to print one copy of the file, so I click the OK button and my file prints out. Every once in a while I need more than one copy, so when the Print window is displayed, I go to the Page Handling area and enter a larger number in the Copies option and click the OK button to have my job print out.

The problem that I have is that the next time I print, the program does not reset the number of copies back to "one". When I print again, I have to remember to actually stop and look at the Print window to see what the number of copies is set at before I print. I find this to be an annoyance because 95% of the time I use the program, I am just clicking the OK button to move through this screen.

If I last used this program to print 10 copies of something a couple of days ago, the odds are pretty good that when I first use the program to print today, I am going find myself printing 10 copies (instead of 1) and throwing out rest of the copies of today's document. And then to reset this counter, I am going to need to print one more copy of a document to actually get the counter reset to 1 for future print jobs.

I run into this problem in many different programs, but for some reason it really aggravates me in Acrobat. This could be because when I print more than one copy of a PDF file, I tend to be MANY more copies, not just two or three. Or it could be because there are a few hundred choices in the Preferences area, but nothing I see fixes my issue.

Realistically, I would like to see a little checkbox on the Print window that actually asks if you want to save the print count for future jobs. No check in the box and the program defaults back to 1 copy for future print jobs. This would be a resource-saving green option for many programs, not just Acrobat.

Having this option would save me a little of my sanity and many reams of paper.