In praise of

I’m very quick to criticise.  I don’t know why because I’m nowhere near perfect and mistakes are second nature to me.  Apparently I have a talent for spotting things that are wrong or things that don’t fit a pattern.  I haven’t decided this, someone has told me that I have this skill.

Anyway, enough about my skills or handicaps, the reason for starting in this way is that I can be slow to praise.  Again, I don’t know why that is and actually I wish I wasn’t like that.  This post seeks to single out an individual and company for recognition of a job well done.

On Sunday night I decided to clear down all the videos that I had on my 2008 Flip Mino. (I know I bought before HD.  If you’re looking for a birthday present idea, I’ll have a Flip Ultra III HD thank you very much.)

I was uploading and sorting videos and making small movies with some of the content.  It really is ultra easy with Flip although it’s not an overly flexible movie making tool as it doesn’t allow for sophisticated editing.  I’d made a couple of movies and for the last one I wanted to add music.

The first faff I had was changing the mp4 file I had into mp3 which would be accepted by the Flip software.  I did it, can’t remember how but it worked.

The only thing I needed to do next was click the Make Movie button.  Movie burning is quite a slow process and after it had churned away for a while and was almost finished, an error message popped up.  It was getting late but I wanted to finish the movie for Hannah to see the next day so I had another go, and hit the same error, and another go, and hit the same error.  Each attempt took quite some time so after three tries and three errors I was a tad frustrated with the whole process.

I went onto the web and found the Flip website and found the online help.  I can be a bit wary of those, especially if they’re like the one that BT uses.  There’s nothing worse than 30 seconds in discovering you’re chatting online with a poorly programmed robot who can’t help at all.  Well actually there is something worse and that’s chatting online for 30 minutes and then realising the very well spoken person you’ve been chatting to is a very well programmed robot.  That’s sort of humiliating.  Credit where credit is due, you know you’re talking to a machine on the BT site.

Well Freddie (30065E), on the Flip site was very well spoken and very patient, even coping very well when I inadvertently shouted with accidental caps lock and apologised.  He also threw in a couple of typos which I thought could have been the brainchild of a very devious programmer.  @stormcab on twitter suggested that I ask Freddie (30065E) about the meaning of life as that always throws the bots.  I didn’t because if Freddie (30065E) was real I didn’t want to insult him by accusing him of being non human.

Freddie (30065E) took me through diagnosis of the problem and two time consuming software updates.  He was polite, patient, modest and I think he was real.

So thank you Flip.  If Freddie (30065E) was real then he is an asset to your organisation.  If he was a programme then I would dearly like to know which company you use because damn it, they’re good!

Oh and the video, it’s here: