When writing a blog, it’s best to avoid as many work issues or stories that you have, simply because it can bite you in the ass if something is taken the wrong way.  What I’m about to relay to you is simply a benign story that I found amusing and harms no one.

Most of you know I test web sites for a living.  My current company deals with online auction management software and it’s the Quality Assurance group’s job to ensure the site is working as intended.  It’s fun to try to make software scream until it cries “uncle”.

Anyway, we include a sizeable amount of “webinars” on our website in order to help our customers learn the product on their own, in addition to the standard training that they get from us.  One of our newest product offerings incorporates sellers who also have an Amazon Seller Central store.  We just included a new webinar that outlines the basic functionality of this enhancement to our product and it’s something I’ve been the sole QA tester for.  The marketing department makes these webinars and it’s not something we normally review.  I noticed the new link on the site that was going to be added and it included a 16-minute promotional video on this new service.  For grins I figured I’d watch it to make sure it was accurate.

One thing about having online tutorials is that when you are recording them, or hosting it live via web conferencing, you want to make sure all peripheral distractions are disabled on your PC.  This means no instant messaging systems are running and no email notification windows are displayed.  Even if you have both of those controlled, you still need to make sure that the pages in the site that you are accessing for display contain a) relevant sample data b) nothing live that unscrupulous users could use and c) somewhat tasteful data examples.  For example, it’s probably not a good idea to have an Orders screen showing a user with a name like Turd Ferguson with an email address of goatfucker@assplay.org who just happens to reside at 6969 Donkeypunch Lane in Cornhole, GA.

To quickly summarize, one of the Account Setup screens on our side can disable an order feed from Amazon by simply having one of the fields not match the live Amazon account set up.  A lot of times if we’re switching accounts we add an “x” to the beginning or end of a field entry.  On the webinar, someone had added an “xxx” to the end of the store name, so if you didn’t know better, you’d think we’re sampling an internet porn store for our tutorial.

More amusing was when the webinar narrator navigated to the Orders screen where there was a sampling of test orders.  The account used has been tested by other departments too, and when they recorded this webinar, they didn’t look to see the “name” of the first buyer’s name on the list of Orders.  If they had, they probably would have deleted the name Carrie Heifer Butt!!!  Thankfully this wasn’t an obscene example but still not a professional example to use.