Posts tagged: RANTS

Mac troubleshooting tips + bonus rant

DoctorMac Direct, a remote tech support service for Mac users, has a very handy Quick Checks and Fixes page that walks through a lot of good standard “try this first” troubleshooting techniques. If you’re an experienced Mac admin or power user you know most of this stuff already, but bookmark the page for the next time you get asked for advice. We all have succumbed to the temptation to try short-circuiting the troubleshooting process, but often we just end up discovering the disconnected cable twenty minutes later that way.

The support experience

I recently encountered an amazingly stupid outsourced Adobe.com “how was your support experience” survey. I got to the end of the survey and there was a single button with text above it saying something like, “Click the button below to submit your survey and close this window.”

I looked at the page source – the button does not submit the survey, which is already complete; it’s just a Javascript action to close the window. And the script is broken! So in Safari at least, it does nothing at all. Some poor schmuck is going to be sitting there futilely pounding on the button trying to “submit” the fifteen-page survey he just completed.