I love my iPhone, but there is a problem and it is growing exponentially.
Not with the technology, but with the morons who use it.
This is increasingly what I deal with: I do a job. I email in the final file. Within hours I receive a hearty "Looks Great! Thanks!" from the client. Days or weeks later comes the angry email... "What is this? This isn't what I approved! It's totally different!"
I don't know what they think happened. Do they think I snuck into their office and swapped out the file like it was Folger's Crystals?
By now I know the drill, so the first thing I ask is...
...Did you approve this on your iPhone?
And the answer is always yes. It was approved after looking at it on a 3 inch iPhone screen. While driving.
What the iPhone has done is it has unshackled stupidity. No longer do you have to be content being incompetent from a corner office, you now have the freedom to be incompetent on the go.
This was a particular problem with the last job. Typically, once I had finished a job it went to our proofreader. We actually had a full-time, dedicated employee who's sole job was to proof all the copy on every job. Her name was Dorothy. Within hours, Dorothy would email in her A-OK and the job would go off to the client, and within hours of that, the client would shoot off an angry email pointing out all the typos. But that wasn't Dorothy's fault. Dorothy was a busy girl. Dorothy was rarely in the office. Dorothy was doing her job on an iPhone. As you can probably imagine, when you proof page after page of 9 point type on an iPhone, things get missed. Dorothy couldn't be expected to catch things on an iPhone could she? That would be silly. So it was my fault.
Which brings me to this morning. I had designed a logo for a sporting wear company. The owner emailed me on Wednesday asking for a minor change and asked me to re-send the files. I did so immediately. This morning I received a text...
"You never sent me the files I requested on Wednesday."
But, in fact, I had. I found them in my "sent" file. I texted him back and said that I did in fact send them but that I would send them again. And I did. Fifteen minutes later I texted him again, asking if he had received the files this time.
"No."
We tried again. Again he said he didn't receive them.
Finally, I did the unthinkably retrograde thing. I called him.
"So you didn't receive any of the files? I've sent them three times. Are you getting any email from me?" I asked.
"Well" he said, "I do receive email from you, but they take too long to download on my phone so I just delete them."
I took a minute and counted to ten. I explained that the emails he was deleting were in fact the files he requested. The reason they were taking a long time to download was because they were, you know, his JOB. They were image files. They were big.
"Oh" he said. "I don't have Wifi. Can you send them faster?"
Oy vey.
I told him I would reduce the file size but that it would lower the resolution and might be hard to make out on a iPhone screen. He said OK and so I did it.
He emailed back.
"These look fuzzy. Make them bigger."
I get the impression I will be on this Merry-Go-Round all day.
