1 August 2002
Why is it that no one either (a) knows how to communicate what they want, or (b) has no idea what it is they are doing?
If you want to get to the good shit, skip the next paragraph. If you want to know exactly what the fuck it is that I'm talking about, however, read on.
For those of you that haven't been keeping up on current Kenny events, I am no longer in the bar business. I work as an administrative assistant for an internet company that optimizes websites for search engines. You want to be on the first page of Google, come see us. My job, from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. from Monday to Friday (minus the noon lunch hour) is spent deriving keywords. Keywords, for those of you who never did HTML, are words set in the code of a web page that a search engine picks up on when it hits your site. "Drunk bastard" would be a keyword for this site, or "alcohol," or "drunk jokes." Some search engines work differently than others, and... oh fuck it, you get the idea. Someone comes to me with a website for XYZ Corporation, I go through the website and pick out things that people would be searching for. Then I put those words into a program that spits out derivatives of that word, along with how many times in the last month that people searched the internet using those exact words. Then I compile a list of hundreds of keywords and send them back to a project manager. Then said project manager comes back to me with the next draft of those keywords, and I plug them into a spreadsheet along with how many pages come up on different search engines with those keywords. We call this a KEI. Then I send that back to the PM. Then I get that list back in a revised form, and I have to come up with a description for each keyword, which also goes into a META tag in the HTML code. Now that your head feels like John Hurt's stomach in "Alien," I'll get to the meat of the rant.
I work fast. I work thoroughly. But, like any good, efficient machine, I need parameters in which to work. If you want me to give you keywords, you need to tell me how many. I can give you 5, 50, 500, or 5000, but I need to know what YOU need. If you go to buy a shirt, you tell the hot little sales girl at The Gap what kind of shirt you are looking for, right? So why, in the last two days, have I had two different PMs come to me TWICE with something because they couldn't communicate it right the first time?
Example one: Daniele wants 100 keywords for a company that designs instrumentation for detecting cancer. The list currently has 80 words. I ask her if she wants 100 ON TOP OF the current list (which would be 180), or INCLUDING the list (which means I need 20 more). She replies that she needs 100 total. Now some of the keywords have zero counts, meaning that while they sounded like they would be something someone would go to a search engine with, no one did. What do I do with the zeros? Her reply: Delete them unless I need them to fill the list out to 100.
This is what my instructions are, as given by the previous exchanges: delete the zero count keywords, and build new ones (presumably that have counts) so the list is 100 keywords long. And that is what I do. I also go one step further and give the KEI for each keyword. I e-mail it to her. Her reply: Can you get more? My reply: I can get more, yes, but you told me you want 100. Her answer: Well, I need more, and also put back in the zero count keywords that you deleted. How many is more? 150.
So, instead of saying, "I need 150 keywords," she told me she needed 20 more, PLUS delete the zero count words and make up for those, then add the deleted words back in, and fill the list out so it is 150 words long. One simple command took seven e-mails to figure out.
Am I the only one who sees the absolute stupidity in this?
Example two: Shea send me three websites - jiverecords.com, britney.com (yes, THE Britney), and nsync-world.com to build keywords for. How many, I ask? As many as I could, a couple of hundred. Fine. I came up with (between the three sites) around 450 keywords. Great, thank you, the list looks great.
You think that's the end? Dumb bunny, of course not! at 4:55 p.m. (yes, five minutes before I'm off), Greg, one of the sales guys, comes in and begins to try and explain to me that he needs more keywords. Of course, he couldn't just come out and say that, he had to speak as if he was addressing a four-year old chipmunk. Well, we need broader keywords, ones that people wouldn't SPECIFICALLY be looking for this site with, blahblahblah, I'm going to have Joe go over this to show you what I mean. So, with Greg standing there, I type "punk music" into the KB to see what it spits out. He looks at the screen with a look as if his left nut was jammed in the teeth of his pants zipper. "Punk music?" he asks. "Yeah," I replied. "Well, I don't know if I would use that," he says.
Goldfinger is signed to Jive Records. Goldfinger is a punk rock band. Apparently, Greg has no idea (outside of Britney Spears and NSYNC) who is signed by Jive, because if he DID, he wouldn't have had that pubic-sack-stuck-in-the-fly look. So Greg leaves, and a minute later I get called to go to Joe's office. After a mini-outburst about why can't people just SAY WHAT THE FUCK THEY WANT?! Grant tells me to put a smile on my face and go down there.
So I get to Joe's office, and we sit there for about, oh, 48 seconds, and the following issues get resolved: I know what I'm doing, he just needs a broader (and longer) set of keywords, 500 for one site, and 250 for each of the other two. Now, if either (a) Shea had told me this when I said "How many?" or (b) Greg was able to communicate without sounding like he was on a double hit of Thorazine, my meeting with Joe would have been completely unnecessary, and the list would have been done right the first time. Instead, three times the talking and meeting and walking had to take place when it was completely unnecessary. The fact that they needed more words was not the issue. The issue was that no one was able to clearly communicate what they needed, so I end up looking like a schmuck.
Is it so much to ask to simply say what the FUCK you want? This goes WAY beyond women saying one thing and meaning another - I can fill entire mainframes with THAT rant. If you want a double chocolate ice cream cone with sprinkles, don't ask me for a single vanilla cone, then say you want a single chocolate cone instead with nuts, then say you don't want the nuts, but you want an extra scoop of chocolate and some sprinkles (I just got a craving for Carvel). Use that mouth that God gave you to clearly and correctly tell me just what it is you want. That's the problem with the whole fuckin' world, we're all running around on incomplete and erroneous information. No wonder we're so fucked up as a race.
