Don't Leave Quality Control to the End User

 Back in the 70s there was the infamous Ford Pinto memo where executives basically said it was cheaper to settle a few wrongful death suits than to recall their shitty product.  You'd think companies might have learned something from the public outcry to that, but nah.  Companies, especially cheap Chinese manufacturers don't really seem to give a shit about quality and leave it up to consumers to find the flaws in their poor designs and manufacturing.

I think in one entry I talked about some really stupid things I got from Vine, like a watch where the hands would cover the digital display at the 45th minute of every hour or all through either 9 o'clock.  It was something so obvious I couldn't believe no designer realized the flaw.  Or an in-room air conditioner that creates a bunch of excess moisture you really need to drain every time you use it or it starts making a lot of noise--but they put the drain so low to the ground it's really hard to do without making a mess.  Because everyone has a floor drain handy, right?  And everyone wants to unhook the air conditioner to wheel it over to the floor drain, right?  Nope to both.  After trying to find a pan or dish that could fit under it, I found a solution:  diapers!  I got some diapers and incontinence pads from Amazon Vine and found putting one--or really just one half of a diaper--under the drain would soak up the moisture without much mess.  Still, if they had just put the drain an inch or so up, I wouldn't have to go to the trouble.

A few months ago I got this coffee mug that has a thing to stir your drink.  It's a magnetic pellet that looks like a vitamin capsule.  You put that in the bottom and then it'll mix stuff up.  Which does work.  But the obvious flaws were A) the mug is about the size of a 32oz cup but only holds about 12oz of liquid and B) they give you a flat lid instead of a sippy lid.  The latter makes it very difficult to drink on the road because you either have to A) keep taking off the lid and putting it on or B) not open it the whole trip or C) open it and every time you hit a bump (frequent on Michigan roads) your coffee sloshes all over.  I was already in a bad mood so I wound up getting so frustrated by the shitty design that I threw the fucking thing out the window.

Often ordering stuff from Amazon Vine feels like you're getting stuff from the Island of Misfit Toys.  There are dollar store-quality action figures and pens they charge people real brand prices.  There was a stuffed "banana duck" with so little stuffing that he couldn't stand; fortunately they had the foresight to put a zipper in back so I could use some stuffing I had in my closet.  There was a camping toilet with legs that wouldn't go on the proper way; you either have to put them on backwards so they won't lock in place or else the feet of the legs won't be flat on the ground to make your toilet wobbly.  A fan that's supposed to plug into the USB port of a car didn't actually work on my car's USB port; it does work if I plug it into an adapter for the 12V port--the former cigarette lighter.  Even then it wouldn't really work in my car because the dashboard is too high.  When I tried plugging it into portable chargers, it only worked with one--and only on the lowest speed.  But it does work pretty good plugged into my computer.  So that's something.  What I found out from the company is the thing is overpowered so a lot of older chargers and apparently the USB plug in my car don't have enough power to run it.  I got a new portable charger with more power (Tim Allen grunt) that mostly runs the thing fine.  Still, it's the kind of thing I wish someone would have mentioned.

Another example is I got an MP3 player that claimed to hold 48GB, which is good because my music collection on MP3 is somewhere around 37GB, so it's too big to put on a 32GB unit but 64GB leaves a lot of empty space.  When the thing comes, I find out that it might hold 48GB, buuuuut that's 16GB internally and 32GB in an external card.  Which is annoying then because I have to split my music between them instead of just putting it all internally or externally.  I checked and it does say that in the product description, but it's a few mind-numbingly poorly written bullet points down.  It'd be better to just say it's a 16GB expandable to whatever.

A few days after I gave that MP3 player a 3-star review, someone going by the name "Cynthia Nelson" started to harass me by email about taking down the review or changing it.  She even offered me $30--ha ha.  I kept refusing and saying that if Amazon found out I took a bribe I'd lose my account--maybe all of my accounts.  They kept at it and I finally said to fuck off.  Then they started over with the same boilerplate email they sent the first time.  At which point I said I was changing my review to 1-star and mentioning this harassment.  The weird thing is they had plenty of 4-star or higher reviews and the product wasn't even available to buy and my review was 3 stars so it wasn't really hurting them.  Why go to all this effort to try to get rid of it?  And I'm sure if I'd taken the review down they would have just ghosted me instead of paying me; I'm 99.9% sure Cynthia Nelson was not a real name.  I don't even know how these assholes get my Amazon email because I've removed it from my profile; maybe there's some Contact button for sellers to contact reviewers.

Then there was a particularly weird time when I ordered candles.  The listing said "romantic candles" but I didn't think much of that.  I mean most people consider candlelight romantic, right?  But when the package came there was a white box and inside were two smaller boxes for "bondage candles."  According to the box description they were meant to be used for S&M play.  But looking at the reviews, one woman who tried this--wisely just on her arm--got burned.  So what seems pretty obvious is the company was stuck with a bunch of "bondage candles" that couldn't be used for bondage so they decided to remarket them as regular candles.  Except they were too lazy to fully repackage them and just put a blank box over them.  Or maybe they did intend for people to use them that way and didn't give a crap that people could get burned--see the Ford memo.

At work one of the things that really irks me is when I get checks that shouldn't have even come to me.  A lot of the time it's that the person or business mailing them was supposed to send the payment to a sister company in Warren.  What happens is whoever is doing the accounting doesn't bother to check the paperwork they get from the courts to see where the payments go so they just send it to where they sent it before.  Then the payment gets tied up for weeks getting sent back and resent to the right people.  Or sometimes they actually put the Warren address and then I don't really know what they're thinking in sending it to Novi.  I mean, they're like 30-40 miles apart.

One time, before the pandemic even, I got a check from a company in San Jose, California to another company in Los Angeles.  Somehow this check mailed from California and going to California went 2500 miles east, through numerous stops along the way, for some reason got delivered to our office, and the person in the mailroom put it with our accounts receivable to end up on my desk.  In other words, no one looked at the damned thing until I did or else they would have realized there was no way it should have been given to me.

With most products now, the instructions they give you are almost worse than useless.  I'm not sure if they write them in AI or just write them in Mandarin and Google Translate them, but the English is so bad that often it's just gibberish.  Quite a few of them say "Warm Tip" instead of "Warning."  One said to use "dig soap" instead of "dish soap" and another kept saying "armyworm" to refer to its glue pad to catch bugs.  I always think to myself, "Couldn't they just pay someone $5 on Fiverr or somewhere like that to do a proper translation?  Would that really be so difficult?  At least have someone who knows English as a first language proofread it for you so it doesn't come out as gibberish.

But especially as AI grows, you can probably expect more stuff like that.  No one really looking at things or evaluating the designs or instructions or anything.  Just slap it together and ship it out and let the user find the flaws.  Which like with the Ford Pinto can be deadly.  But it's easier to deal with a few bad reviews or a lawsuit--especially if you're some fly-by-night company in China--than to spend the money to do things right.  

A lot of these silly Chinese companies lately will come after me if I post a bad review, like the one I mentioned above.  They're not mean so much as just really stupid.  They keep offering a "refund," which isn't possible for Vine products.  And when I tell them that they propose a replacement.  If the first one sucks, why would I want another?  Because usually it's not that these products are defective so much as just poorly designed and manufactured.  Anyway, the not-so-subtle ask is that if they give you a refund or replacement you'll change or delete your review, which is against the rules but if they don't directly say that it's not illegal.

Of course these problems also happen with writing.  You get people who think spellchecking a book is enough editing or don't even bother with that and slop out a "book" filled with typos and horrible formatting.  In a few cases that's me when I put out books like First Contact and Waking Prometheus from 1995-2000 that have comma splices and stuff that are too numerous to be fixed easily.  Though I did know about the problems; I was just too lazy to fix them.  Is that better?  No.

You should definitely not be so lazy that you don't take time to do a proper editing pass.  Or have someone do it for you if you don't really know spelling or grammar or anything like that.  It took Ford a while to recover its reputation and to some people it still hasn't.  For an author, especially a new one, getting a bunch of bad reviews or ratings because you didn't bother to fix obvious problems may not be something you can recover from.