It Shouldn't Be That Hard

Over the past many months I've been making changes to the way I do things here at Dan Pelley Educational Services. I've discontinued my rarely used in-bound toll free number and expanded my on line presence. I parted company with my primary e-mail provider and added a more user friendly one. I've begun to accept ACH transfers as payments from customers. I'm also re-evaluating our use of fax, email and other tools as well.

Because of this, I found myself needing new business cards. Ordinarily I would go to Image Printing, a company I have been pleased to work with for many years. However, since I've already changed my primary email address twice in the last three months, and because I'm still not convinced which email system is best suited to my primary email needs, I didn't want the expense of professional printing for cards that may become obsolete very soon.

After seeing business card blank forms in a catalog, I decided to try them. They are made by an office supply company that is well recognized. I've used many of their other products over the years. They offered free on line templates compatible with my word processor, plus three other ways to design and print business cards. So I bought a pack of 200 cards to try it.

I then spent many, many miserable hours trying to do a simple layout and print job that ended up ranking among the top ten aggravating frustrating computer experiences I've had over the years (and I've had a lot of them). I should have known I was in for trouble when most user evaluations of the template I needed were 1 star or less. "Trash, junk, garbage, useless" is what most of them said. Except for one who talked about successfully using the tools and conventions for tables.

Okay. That made sense. After all I thought, five rows and two columns of business cards is most likely organized as a table. Besides, I've successfully used this company's templates for mailing labels in the past, how hard can this be? I downloaded the template. The download process wasn't seamless, but it wasn't all that bad to get through. And of course it included the obligatory collection of my email address as well as a routing through a page of other products, just in case I wanted to buy more things while I was in the process of learning how to use what I just bought.

Yes, I got a table. And a very strange one indeed. When I clicked on select table I got one cell. Some table functions seemed to work. Other table functions did not. Adding graphics was extremely difficult (but I find adding graphics in my word processor often tends to be difficult). Cut and paste gave me very strange results. Hours had gone by. I actually had one cell complete with a business card the way I wanted it (including my logo graphics), but just couldn't get all 10 cells of the table to replicate perfectly.

In frustration I went back to the company website from whence the template came. A second option was to use their "wizard" which (they said) would work with all their products and would be compatible with my word processor as well as several other programs. I could easily add logos and graphics to all their products. Download was free. So I did it. More routing through pages where I could get distracted by other offerings. the obligatory email address again, another not quite seamless download and nearly 100 Mb later, there I was .

And there I dropped. Turns out their easy-to-use system was a stripped down version of my word processor that lacked such tools as edit text box or edit picture. Complete waste of time.

Well, I then reasoned, I think I can just use my word processor tools to create a table to the specifications I needed. And I did. With much frustration and aggravation due to the exactness I needed and the tendency of software systems do things (by default) that that you really didn't want. But I did it. I printed the first sheet of business cards six hours after throwing away the "wizard" and going it alone.

My friends it just shouldn't be that hard to create a business card.

One last thought here. This situation is an example of how a good brand name gets tarnished. I have known and trusted this brand name for years. In the past I would purchase their products without question. I trusted them on the quality of their products and services. Today I look at them somewhat differently. And that's the lesson for today. Too many companies are so busy gathering your email address, routing you through product offerings, and trying so hard to get you to buy more that they fail to properly deliver the product or service you paid them for. ( Click here to see a related post).

About Pelleyblog. This blog covers topics of interest to managers, particularly those at the first-line supervisor level. Occasionally we include topics of general interest, topics about Dan Pelley's background and experiences, and a rare occasional rant. We welcome your comments on this or any other post.

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