This blog was created because i needed a space to vent the reactions provoked by my job - technical support of certain software by e-mail. Sometimes people ask such questions that I really would like to say a couple of “very warm” words but I can’t! Yet it’s very difficult to keep it to myself.
Many of those things I also believe will be funny for technically literate people.
And I intend to include with the “sincere” reply the one that was actually sent. So perhaps this blog can also serve as a learning tool for myself and perhaps for someone else with the same problems! =))
Tue
Nov
27
I love Arabs writing to our support from big webstores - very easy to deal with! They would write a message in Arabic. Of course, I can only reply I cannot read it and ask writing in English. But 90% of those replies come back undelivered because they couldn’t spell their own e-mail properly when filling the form. Problem soved! =P
Wed
May
30
God I ‘love’ when customers write software name and nothing else in the letter. Software what? Do they really think I have to guess?!
Or they also like to write “register”. Do they think I’m a bot? LOL! Register what? We have like 150 total titles for different platforms.
Well, of course, with 70% probability the former also want a registration and they all pretend or really just came out of the woods yesterday asking for a registration as if not guessing it costs money - not to mention the price is at our site where they probably got it and no catalogs list it as freeware.
No I can’t read minds and I’m not gonna guess. I’m gonna ask and spend less time on it than to went it here =))
Fri
May
18
I hate it when customers send us our own software installations as e-mail attachments. Why on Earth would we need that?! We’ve got them all here, thank you! %-)
The thing also is we get like 80% of SPAM, sometimes very big messages with PDF attachments, so I have a message download size limit, so for those letters I see coming from our customers I have to download them additionally and then only to find our own software attached to it? I don’t know what are they thinking or whether they are thinking at all when they do that! LOL
Thu
Mar
1
Did you ever need to find pictures similar to the one you have but a little different?
Or find out if someone is using your photos or graphics without any reference to the author?
Or find the original or a bigger resolution version of a small celebrity picture posted by someone else?
Or check this new online contact if it is their picture, coz they look too good?
Well, I often wanted the former and yesterday ran into the need of the latter and I found out there are such tools now!
The first is around, it seems for quite a while - TinEye.
It found my suspicions were correct and pointed me right to the source of the photo in a stock, with other pictures from the set listed, author and model names (mind you, it wasn’t some easily available photo, the guy have probably bought a few from the stock to support his fake looks!).
Then I found out Google has also launched a reverse image search! It is now present as a widget in Google Images search bar but using it is not obvious even for experienced folks like me, so you really need to see the introduction video.
I also ran into opinions that this new service will render TinEye obsolete since Google already has a huge image base.
But IMO Stephen Chapman is wrong in his article saying Google RISE outperforms TinEye at every test. But in my single real life event case it was actually the other way around!
Google has shown me all versions of this picture in a heap plus visually similar pictures. That could be useful if I wanted to track down all the copies of my photo on the Internet or find a similar photo - say, of a green chameleon standing in full profile. It is in fact awfully useful when you’re looking for a picture for some collage with a general idea, but trying to find one by search terms can prove quite exhausting - you know what I mean if you ever tried. It is also amazing how it translates the content into words describing what’s on this picture!
But to find who is on the picture it’s pretty useless for the very reasons there are too many results.
While TinEye has shown me the only result but it was all I needed to track down the source of the picture - it’s author and the pictured person. It was not a very popular photo but in case with more popular ones it ranges down in first results the evolution of this picture from site to site where each of them first appeared which is actually quite interesting!
This could also be useful to trace the source of a photo or author of an image. But with a drawing I ran into a dead-end where the results found were only smaller than my source, while Google found bigger ones, which could actually be the database size problem, yet Google doesn’t range them except by size while TinEye offers “Best match” and “Most changed” view order - the actual history of a picture change. If available - sometimes, it’s just a range of edited version with some overlay or alike. And also can be very useful to track your original artwork changed by someone else.
So, I say, in no way does Google replace TinEye - they are made for different purposes. And let them both live and improve!
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Fri
Feb
24
Device maker company massively promoted an OS update and we reap the consequences of this action, the more strange that the whole platform is about dying.
Firstly, with system update users lost the software. Getting it back with our free-download+registraion-number licensing system is not a problem. But many bought it at the maker’s pay-to-download store which is not as easy to get the app back. And users send their claims to us. I wonder if they are also turning to the maker instead of the store in case of buying some physical device and finding that some pieces from the set are missing! So, while we can’t and shouldn’t answer for the store, that was still a lot of explanation I had to do.
Secondly and more sadly, some of our applications lost full compatibility with the new OS version (works for some, not for others). But we already diverted our development efforts elsewhere, so no updates are to be expected.
Some users genuinely believe we are liable to make compatiblity updates to the applications and I have to remind them that we offer the software “AS IS” meaning no obligations to update or fix (as written in the license displayed before installing which nobody reads). This, of course, doesn’t make them any happier.
We can only offer refund in this situation. But some people are still not happy. Pity I can’t send them all my thoughts on the matter ;)
So, my replies goes like this:
[Refund instructions]
This way, all liabilities should be settled within the measures of each party’s abilities, we believe. Except the fact not everything works the way we or you want, which is a rather moral damage but we don’t think it’s reparable since we can’t sue God.
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Mon
Feb
13
Sometimes people are afraid to sumbit their device identifier required for licensing when purchasing (license is valid only for one device) and they write all kind of stupid things like that it’s their social security number or someone can hack their device with this info…
PARANOIDS! That number is written right on the box! So if anyone is targeting you, he doesn’t even have to steal your device, just see the box. Not to mention that if that was sensitive data, makers wouldn’t be putting it on the box. While knowing it for insurance and warranty does make sense - to be able to identify the very device (so that the client doesn’t abuse those), it doesn’t mean anyone can use this number to somehow abuse your insurance (they’ll need more of your papers harder to get than a hand-held always carried around), your records with cell service provider (it’s identified normally by number, which we don’t ask, and not harware ID) or hack your device (in fact, to hack it, it’s not necessary to know this number at all)!
Bottom-line: the device identifier cannot be used for anything else than device identification, geese!
Mon
Dec
26
This spam can be sometimes funny. Not that I read it but when I manually sort the leftovers after mild spam filtering rules - otherwise I’d drown yet they sometimes grab clients’ e-mails we don’t want to miss - the eye does catch some of the phrases.
“My name is Giliann, im really hot ukrainian girl” - first of all, nobody names girls Gillian in Ukraine, but actually that was my second thought. The immediate one was - if it was a message I could reply to (spam usually isn’t because its return e-mail is fake - a real one would be terminated at once), I’d say immediately: “Hey, I’m a Ukrainian girl too!” LOL
That’s actually something new, before this week they were mostly Russian hot girls - I guess it’s due to spam/spamfilters ongoing war, they always change something, that’s also the reason why stupid mistakes in words (on purpose, to not be caught). It must be working if they keep doing it which sadly means the percent of idiots in the world is still sufficiently high for it to be such a mess.
Fri
Oct
21
Amazing, how some people persistently set themselves to negative thinking before even trying to see what could be wrong, if they have a problem.
CUSTOMER: What is the problem? I bought the software but didn’t receive a code. What, is my money not good enough? etc…
ME: Look into your SPAM folder. Here’s also a link to your codes on our site.
CUSTOMER: Your codes are not working. If you can’t fix it, please refund!
Why in hell would you think at once we can’t fix it? This kind of problems is 100% fixable, you just need to follow our instructions, which I sent, of course, but from experience I may expect this guy will not be able to - lack of patience or overflow of anger, whatever you call it. But this is the first time when I see so clearly a person is set for conflict and defeat way beforehand.
Definitely, negative thinking kills any of your enterprises even before you start.
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