begin quoting Michael Werneke as of Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 08:47:31AM -0400: > On 9/6/06, Tracy R Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > <snip> > >We had no less than 3 discussions with their sales rep and engineers > >explaining in great detail how we want this set up. Just. Like. The. > >Existing. Office. My boss, myself, our lead programmer, etc. We pay an > >expedite fee because we need it fast. One day an email with a unexpected > >Visio presentation shows up. We don't have Visio anywhere so nobody > >opened it. > > That was the first mistake. Just because you don't have Visio does > not exempt you from making an attempt at getting the information > contained therein. The first thing that should have been done is to > call Cox immediately and tell them you don't use Visio and you need > the information in another format.
Don't even need to go that far. Just respond with "I can't read what you sent." If it's that you don't have the tools, or it's against company policy to access potential virus carrying formats (is Visio like the rest of the M$ suite, and comes macro-virus enabled?), it makes no difference. "We don't do that here" is acceptable. Cox might say "tough noogies", but that's their choice, and you could (hopefully) take your business elsewhere. A "got it, can't read it, now what?" puts the ball back into Cox's court. [snip] > >Now they pointing to that Visio document and our lack of response to it > >as evidence of our acceptance of the design. > > They made a genuine attempt to verify that what they had was what you > wanted. Again, you dropped the ball here by not making *any* effort > to open the doc or get it in another format. Remember that the > majority of the world still uses Microsoft software to communicate. s/to communicate/for CYA/ Lack of response != acceptance. Especially with regards to email. They "made a genuine attempt" my ass -- email is *not* reliable, and Cox should know this. It could have been lost in transit, eaten by a spam filter, corrupted by a virus-filter, etc. etc. What it comes down to is that Cox was lazy, because they didn't HAVE any incentive not to be. It's no skin off their nose, so of _course_ they're going to take the easy way for them. > >When we found out what > >happened and told them we could not read Visio documents they sent us a > >screenshot...of a visio window...in jpeg format...pasted into an MS Word > >doc! > > There was alot of chatter about this in the channel one day. I do not > see what they did wrong here. Anyone can open a .doc file. Um, no. It's still a closed stanard. At home, I use antiword. It is amusing when someone sends you a .doc file to respond with a document in the format of your choice. I liked to include StarOffice 5.2 files. > Almost > everyone uses Word and there are free Word doc viewers and there is > OO.o. Embedding a .jpeg in a .doc did not delay your installation. The issue is, I suspect, is that they didn't just send the jpeg. They took the effort to wrap it up into a proprietary format first. Embedding images[1] in MSWord DOC files is a traditional sign of utter incompetence on the part of the sender; people go through all sorts of gyrations in order to embed things into MSWord DOC files, especially things that don't need to be embedded. (I won't install OO.o at home until they let me install it into /tmp as a normal user. Have they fixed this yet? The only free word doc viewer I have on my Solaris machine is antiword (Something went wrong with my StarOffice 5.2 installation), and I compiled it myself -- what are some others?) > >So now we are two weeks behind schedule and have wasted half a month of > >rent on over 5000 square feet of office space plus furniture and we had > >newly hired employees report to work this week and they have nowhere to > >sit! > > Had *anyone* on your staff taken 5 minutes to call Cox upon receipt of > the dreaded Visio .vsd document and asked for some clarification, you > may not be this far behind. Yup. Even a "genuine attempt" to call. :) (Or _r_eply to the email. If Cox sent it from a we-ignore-replies email, well, that's the fault of Cox. "We told you we couldn't read it. Look. Here's the email.") > It's always easier to blame the vendor, but it's not always their > fault. Yup. > Communication is a bi-directional path. Nope. Not always. [1] Either images alone -- "check out this GIF", or images of stuff like text files, PDF files, and so forth. -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
