i-sako.com

Tomorrow my company will announce the (domestic) release of a new product, so today I am busy with preparations. As if my normal workload was not enough to keep me busy, my boss asked me—only about half an hour before quitting time, as usual—to translate a few Japanese documents “for use in the FAQ”.

Ah, the FAQ, one of the least understood abbreviations in my office. Although most people understand FAQ to mean “Frequently Asked Questions,” I have come to understand that in Japan it has a different meaning. I’m still trying to pin down exactly what it does mean here, but I gather it is an amalgam of meanings that covers PR, Q&A, Troubleshooting, and (occasionally) real questions. In my experience, very few of the “questions” (which sometimes are not questions at all, but statements) are ever asked at all, much less frequently. Instead, most of them are thought up by middle management, a committee of middle-aged Japanese guys who don’t understand the technology, but feel qualified to predict the questions a so-called “typical user” might have. The result is a bloated FAQ that is about to explode with information cribbed from product brochures, operation manuals, and press releases.

Not only is the information in the FAQ more readily available in other places and other forms, but the fact that the company uses some of the world’s worst software to manage the information makes the FAQ all but useless to most people. And to top it off, most of the questions that are asked frequently are never added to the FAQ! (An example that springs to mind immediately is product updates. The company is quick to sell products, but slow to provide updated information when required accessories are no longer available in the market.)

Yet somehow the management is convinced that having a “substantial” (read as “expansive") FAQ will reduce the cost of customer support. Perhaps, but so far it has been unwieldy, clunky, and difficult to maintain.

Perhaps it’s time to introduce a new abbreviation to the folks I work with: GIGO.