See these things that you are reading? They're words. I typed 'em so you could read 'em. Simple eh? But apparently it's not. If reading were so simple, why can so many people who are specifically paid to do it fail so badly.
I am actually specifically talking about support people. The people who are not only paid to read, arguably the main premise of their employment is to help, something they often seam to fail at as well.
Last week I ran into a brick wall with ODesk support.
When I setup an ODesk account I didn't immediately put the password into my preferred password locker (1password), which means,... I promptly forgot it.
So last week when I needed to post a job, I followed their reset password flow and encountered a problem. Reseting the password must be done within an hour of them sending the link (obviously for security reasons). The problem was my email bounces through a couple of services and is really slow. A normal email will take may half an hour to arrive (yes it's a pain). Now I don't know if it took them a while to send it but I never could get the email fast enough to reset the password. So I contacted their support explaining that my emails are delivered too slow to work with their password flow and (I kid not) this is their reply:
Thank you for contacting oDesk Support.
We emailed you a link and instructions for updating your password. It should be there momentarily. Please check your email and click the link in the message. After one hour, the link to update your password will expire.
The email was sent at 08:08 am PST and I have just as much of an idea of the country of origin as they have of which country I am in. That may have been the middle of the night for me. Actually I live in Spain and it arrived late afternoon when I was afk.
A reminder, that their support staff are PAID to SUPPORT. In actually fact I would have been better off without support and ODesk would have as well. In the end I just did the job myself. I wanted to hire someone to save me time, but trying to simply to get into my account was eating up the very time I wanted to save.
At least the email had an option to rate my experience. Great! So I clicked to give them feedback on the support and guess what?
I needed to login.
