Re: Best idea of the week, make that year. Yeah, yeah, I know the year just started

["Chuck Martin" <cm -at- writeforyou -dot- com>]

"Dick Margulis" <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net> wrote in message news:229571 -at- techwr-l -dot-  -dot-  -dot- 
>
> Wanna see a brilliant example of how you as a writer can cut down on
> call volume to your company?
>
> Background: I download an icon editor earlier this month. Here is the
> text of an email I received today.
<snip>

>
> Our customers have found this notice useful in confirming otherwise
> unknown credit card charges.  While "Microangelo 5.5" may be easily
> recognizable on your charge statement, "DR DigiBuy.com" may not.
>
<snip>

>
> ---------------------------------
>
> Think how many times you've questioned a charge on your statement for
> exactly this reason and made a call to the company to find out what it
> was about. Think what the phone charges are for that company, let alone
> the cost of staffing and equipping a whole department just to reassure
> callers that the charge is legit. Look what a writer saved DigiBuy by
> composing a friendly, informative, timely, proactive letter.
>

I don't see this as "brilliant" at all, but as another case of making the
docs do the garbage collection for bad design.

Here's the besic question: Why can't "Microangelo 5.5" be printed on the
chrage statement?

Answer: It can--if the system designers wanted to.

Years and years and years (you get the picture) ago, in my very first
programming class (a BASIC class when I was a freshman in high school), some
of the first words out of my teacher's mouth were along the lines of
"Computers a dumb. They will do only and exactly and just what you tell them
to do."

So this system *could* be designed to print "Microangelo 5.5" on your charge
statement, but it wasn't. We could speculate on the many reasons why it
wasn't done this way, but the bottom line is that this eloquently worded and
informative email is nothing more than a Band Aid covering the wound of
another bad design.

Chuck Martin

P.S. To tie this to another thread, this is why a UI seminar is in the long
term more useful than an XML class: done right, the good system design would
alleviate the need for programming a follow-up message.