Eating your own dogfood

At Sunburst I spend a fair amount of time figuring out how we can lower our tech support costs for our software. We sell to technically averse customers and our support reps spend a lot of time troubleshooting issues that are either not really issues (the reason you can't run it on your 10 year old mac, m'am, is because you are running OS 7 and our software is for Mac OSX), or have nothing to do with our software (the reason you can't print, sir, is because you need to plug in the printer). So what we have been doing is slowly but surely reducing live tech support, relying on asynchronous communications media like email, or community-based support like user groups, or even just comprehensive FAQs that are searchable on our site.

This is a long-winded intro to the real point of today's entry. When I logged into blogger this morning I couldn't pull up Walking With Norman. Nothing but a whitescreen. Fearful of losing my major worldwide audience, and knowing that I had a very brief window to post today because of my schedule, I tried different browsers, cleared my cache, restarted my machine, checked to see if I had accidentally deleted my content, etc. Then in a panic I went to the blogger support pages but didn't immediately see a reference to my issue so I searched for a tech support email or phone number but it was (intentionally, I'm sure) buried so all pissed off at how hard they were making it for me I went to Google and typed in "blogger technical support" and got to the right page from there and found a good email form and described in detail my issue and hoped I would get a quick answer. Then I went to close my browser and grab a cup of coffee but then I noticed a reference to Top Support Issues. I clicked the link, and low and behold saw the simple note that if you can't load a blog but you know you didn't delete it, simply republish it. So I did, and well, here we are.

Moral(s) of the story: 1) Brilliantly designed non-human tech support systems often fail in the case of immediate need and user panic; 2) Don't assume if you are yourself technically savvy you never need help; 3) I am an idiot.