Another week, another bout of insanity.
Today’s seizure-inducing episode has to do with one of our smaller clients, and their stubborn refusal to admit that they have no idea what they are doing.
An example, to illustrate: their corporate website gets fewer visitors a day than my blog, and yet they insist on selling advertising space to their peers. A month ago, they had me build a newsletter engine to promote their site, which they then populated with email addresses from their own inboxes. Every couple of weeks, they have a new batch of email addresses that they have harvested without the knowledge of the owners, and every time, I try to explain to them that that is a really bad idea.
Now, normally this is the kind of thing I’d just laugh off. It doesn’t matter what I say to these people, they just go and do it anyway, so I figure, I should just let them discover for themselves why they aren’t ready to push their business online.
Every now and then though, they pull a stunt that just throws me into uncontrollable convulsions.
Case in point: they’re not really happy with the newsletter engine I wrote for them. Their thinking is that if they could send out really nice-looking newsletters, the recipients would be more likely to visit their site. Now I’d agree with this notion if I believed for a second that the recipients they were spamming had any interest whatsoever in what these guys were selling, but well, that’s the problem isn’t it. Shotgun marketing only works if you have millions of targets, and I already told them that engine will only support about 10,000 (beyond that, they need to get a dedicated third-party provider).
So, their tech guy, a fresh grad from some IT school, set about designing a nicer-looking newsletter. He reported that he was designing their new template in CorelDraw and that he would be sending it to a test batch of 50 recipients. I said, sure whatever, add me to the batch so I can see what it looks like.
The next morning, he called me up and complained about some Outlook problem I couldn’t quite understand. He said that he was able to successfully send out his newly-designed newsletter template to all 50 recipients, but that some of them were having problems viewing it. It was taking forever to open. Still bleary-eyed, I checked Outlook and found a 5-fucking-megabyte email clogging up my inbox. A trickle of saliva dripped from the corner of my mouth. The genius had attached the friggin’ CDR file to the test email.
I said, "Dude, you designed this in CorelDraw right."
He said, "Yeah."
I said, "Dude, do you know what a JPEG is?"
He said, "Yeah, that’s a type of file right."
"Uh, yeah … sorta … Hmm. Ok. Let’s talk tomorrow, I’ll figure out how to help you with this."
I mean, come on, I don’t even know where to begin with this guy. I know I shouldn’t really be pissed off at him. What I am pissed off about is that the client just hired some random kid without even bothering to see if he had any skills that were relevant to their business. I mean, I get that they’re trying to save money by hiring someone without any work-experience, but maybe that isn’t the best move when you’ve got an office full of technologically-challenged people and one of your core businesses is a website. I don’t know, I could be wrong, but it sure seems to make sense from where I’m sitting.
Christ!