What's Bugging Staack Right Now? Domain In Search Bar, Not Address Bar!
Any time we run an ad in a magazine, we always get a number people who call just to tell us our website "doesn't work." Of course, our website works fine. We pay good money for a high-end web host that guarantees 99.999% uptime, and for 3rd party multi-DNS downtime monitoring. If the site so much as hiccups, I know about it within literal minutes - if not seconds. So, what's the problem?
They're typing the domain name in a search bar, not the browser address bar!
I'm cool if it happens once in a while, especially when advertising to seniors. On average, we'll only get one of these complaints, out of every 100 ~ 200 calls. For localized ads run South of 37°N latitude, it's around 1 out of every 50 ~ 100. But, in the Southern states (with the exception of parts of Georga), they're generally far more cordial about it, and often accept our explanation without exception. Where we have the most problem are in traditionally Blue states like New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, California, and especially Illinois. Ads around big cities in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and sometimes particular cities like New Orleans and Oklahoma City give us more problems than usual, but no problems in rural and suburban areas. Ads in these areas tend to net 1 such complaint out of every 50 calls. While, it's still not a huge volume, MAN are they DIFFICULT. We get a lot of people who'll refuse to accept that they screwed up, insisting it's our fault for at least a minute or two. At least, most will eventually drop it and just ask for a catalog.
Still, we've gotten a few people that actually got mad, and started getting all pissy at whoever took their call. At that point, they forward the call to me. Lucky me. Last May, after running a quarter-page ad in USA Weekend in California, I got one fellow in his early 30s, who was angrily carrying on about
"Hello, computer...?"
A scene from steffannee's favorite movie, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (aka The Friggin' Whale Movie) how our "broken webpage" was a sign of a broken company, blah blah blah. I bluntly told him I'm staring at the webpage at this very minute. Just as he started talking again, I cut him off and told him that - at that instant - around 50 other people from his state were successfully viewing the webpage for that ad, and over 2000 people from California, Nevada and Arizona had no trouble viewing the webpage up to that point in the day. Furthermore, if he was accusing me of lying to him, I'll gladly print up our web stats and mail it to him, so he can see for himself how our "broken webpage" seems to be working just fine for everyone else. He can then put it under his pillow, at night, so he could sleep better since it's obviously SUCH a huge deal to him. After all, no mentally stable person would call our toll-free number and waste 20 minutes of his life arguing about it with our receptionist and me, if they weren't losing sleep over it.
Yeah, I was in kind of a crummy mood, at that point. I heard him on the line for a few seconds, huffing under his breath - probably thinking of something totally smart to say - right before hanging up on me. My free-flowing indignation is a perk of being upper-management. Heck, our CEO gets a kick out of me stuffing someone over the phone. He hates that nonsense just as much as anyone else here, and finds it amusing how my New York accent rears its head whenever I get worked up.