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If you had purchased an HSM product from a certain company or two (one company bought another, bought another) in approximately 2005-2006, you might have noticed in the WebHelp a "DOs and DON'Ts" page.
It contained (still does mostly) some general cautions and suggested behaviors that field support guys had encountered a lot.
At the end, you would have seen: "And finally, do NOT touch this button." And there was a modest-sized round red button.
If you clicked the button, you got a new "help" page that said "We asked you not to touch the button. Don't touch this button." And the same modest-sized round red button.
Upon clicking that, you went to a new page that said "DON'T touch the button!" (and the button again, always in the same position on the page).
This escalated, with the messages getting more and more exasperated ("Does your mother know you're doing this?? DON'T touch the BUTTON!"...."Look, just STOP, alright? Just stop!"...)
After about page 20 of that sequence, the message said: "If you don't stop touching that button, YOU'LL GO BLIND!"
The next page (after they clicked yet again), said "You were warned!"
A final click brought them to a completely black page.
I got a few notes of appreciation, but an up-and-coming Product Manager caught wind of it and had me remove it. Not serious enough for an "important" company.
When I implemented the original of that, as successive BBS pages on (a corner of) the Ericcson Cellular Systems TAC (Technical Assistance Center) BBS (later became the website) I had 75 pages and the final one didn't just go black, it locked you out of the BBS (later the website) and you had to call Kevin to get re-instated. By the way, most of those pages were lovingly crafted in my off hours. Posting them took seconds.
Currently, my documents and Help for this company are easter-egg and fortune-cookie free. Pretty much.
- Kevin
(yes, I've told that story before on-list)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: poshedly -at- bellsouth -dot- net
>
> Sarah,
>
> It is oh-so-nice to work for people who have a sense of humor.
>
>
> -------------- Original message from "Sarah Stegall"
> <sstegall -at- bivio -dot- net>: --------------
>
>
> > In the late 90s I was working for a small start-up, where I
> had a lot of
> > trouble getting reviews back from programmers and
> engineers. This was
> > especially true of the "warnings" section. So one day, I
> slipped in a
> > warning: Do not run with scissors. I was trying to see how
> many of my
> > readers actually read the stuff they were signing off on
> (very few, as
> > it turned out). When it came time for the final draft, of
> course I took
> > that "warning" out.
> >
> > A message came back from the President/CEO ordering me to
> put it back
> > in.
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Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices. http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
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