blhowes
Puritan Board Professor
I heard something at work today that made me chuckle, thought I'd share it.
Every company does its best to portray a professional image to clients and perspective clients. At times, though, that professional image may be brought into question, and it may be a challenge to defend.
As I've mentioned, I work as a technical writer. Usually, we give pdf copies of our manuals to our customers. On the front cover is a proprietary statement that includes contract information about our customer. I was asked if I could quickly provide a set of user manuals for our customer, which just involved changing the information on the cover pages, creating a pdf of that page, and replacing the old cover pages with the new. I was able to do all but one. It was password protected and the person who created the pdf had left for the day, and I didn't know the password. I had to wait until this morning to get the password.
This morning I went over to get the password. They told me it, then gave me a little background about why they've recently stopped making the pdfs password protected. Apparently, the manuals had gone out to one of our customers, and they wanted to mark up the pdf with comments, but the pdf security wouldn't allow it. They called my company up so they could get the password, and I'm sure the request had to go through several layers of management before it got to those who created the pdfs.
The password I used to open the pdf this morning was "doofus", which was the same one that had to be passed back to the customer. They never expected the password to be needed externally. I wish I was a fly on the wall during the phone conversation or whatever when the customer was informed what the password was.
That made my day!
Every company does its best to portray a professional image to clients and perspective clients. At times, though, that professional image may be brought into question, and it may be a challenge to defend.
As I've mentioned, I work as a technical writer. Usually, we give pdf copies of our manuals to our customers. On the front cover is a proprietary statement that includes contract information about our customer. I was asked if I could quickly provide a set of user manuals for our customer, which just involved changing the information on the cover pages, creating a pdf of that page, and replacing the old cover pages with the new. I was able to do all but one. It was password protected and the person who created the pdf had left for the day, and I didn't know the password. I had to wait until this morning to get the password.
This morning I went over to get the password. They told me it, then gave me a little background about why they've recently stopped making the pdfs password protected. Apparently, the manuals had gone out to one of our customers, and they wanted to mark up the pdf with comments, but the pdf security wouldn't allow it. They called my company up so they could get the password, and I'm sure the request had to go through several layers of management before it got to those who created the pdfs.
The password I used to open the pdf this morning was "doofus", which was the same one that had to be passed back to the customer. They never expected the password to be needed externally. I wish I was a fly on the wall during the phone conversation or whatever when the customer was informed what the password was.
That made my day!
