Searching In The Search Engine

(I get a phone call from an author trying to submit his manuscript through our online system. The link for our submissions is kind of small and easy to miss, and elderly authors especially have difficulty with it, so I’m used to these kinds of calls.)

Me: “Okay, sir, so you entered [Company].com, correct?”

Caller: “Hang on.” *I hear him typing very slowly* “W… W… W… Dot… [Company]… Dot… C… O… M… Enter. Okay.”

Me: “Great! Now if you’ll scroll to the very bottom of the page.”

Caller: “Hang on.” *I hear him scrolling* “Okay.”

Me: “You should see a link that says ‘Guidelines for Authors.’ Do you see it?”

Caller: “No…”

Me: “Oh. Um… Do you see where it says ‘Store Locator’ in bigger letters? It’s right beneath that. I know it’s kind of small.”

Caller: “There’s no ‘Guidelines for Authors’ there.”

(I’m really confused why it’s not displaying on his page, so I spend a good fifteen minutes trying to walk him through it again, checking with IT to see if there have been problems, and repeatedly testing the site on my end.)

Me: “Okay, I can’t figure out why your page doesn’t show it. What DO you see?”

Caller: “It says ‘Help,’ ‘Send Feedback,’ ‘Privacy,’ and ‘Terms.’”

Me: “Huh? What is there right above that?”

Caller: “A blue ‘G,’ a red ‘O,’ a bunch of yellow ‘O’s…”

(That’s when I realized that he’d just entered our site address into the Google search bar and not actually clicked on the link. It didn’t even occur to me that I’d need to be THAT specific with my directions!)