It’s been a while since I’ve been here. My primary contact with InDesign Secrets these days is reading Mike Rankin’s excellent InDesign Tip of the Week columns. But I’ve had a couple of people bring this forum thread to my attention to my attention and felt compelled to contribute. They saw someone essentially using my name in vain, and felt my reputation was being tarnished, if not trashed, in this forum thread.

First, thank you Michel for defending me. Though it’s really not necessary. If you saw the slings and arrows we Adobe Community Professionals suffer on a constant basis, you’d realize that is is barely a flesh wound. Not even in Monty Python terms. I regularly get accused of being 1) an Adobe apologist 2) an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s talking about and 3) a slacker because I don’t fix Adobe so it lets users do what they want — even if they don’t know themselves what they want. Helping in user forums is often a rolling testament that no good deed goes unpunished.

As an Adobe Community Professional, we’re expected to regularly scan Adobe’s user forums and provide expertise to folks with problems using their software. We do this as unpaid contributors, for nominal consideration and for the good of the user community.

This is a long way from my previous work with Adobe as a software consultant. But I’m happy to provide it for the good of the cause. I make my living as an independent computer graphics trainer and consultant. It’s a marginal living, but I like what I do, and my clients appreciate what I do for them. I’ve been working with InDesign since it was introduced in 1999, and using PageMaker and InDesign for 15 years before that. Over more than 35 years as a publishing professional, I’ve had first-person experience in how these programs work — and don’t work — producing publications on deadline, produced all kinds of beautiful pieces off deadline, as well as all kinds of print and digital products. I know my experience is not unique here, but I’m confident that I can play in this league.

Addressing my experience working with Jack, he had asked the same thing he’s asked here in the Adobe InDesign forum on April 29. I provided two responses to his questions the next day and a third on May 1. As Michel points out, Jack marked my answer to his questions as correct, and unfailingly provided positive feedback as I addressed each question he had. I worked diligently to take care of him, and spent just over 7 hours writing responses to his questions, providing screen captures to illustrate them and editing them so they clearly offered him step-by-step solutions to his issues. At the end of my third response, I told him I was going to sign off from the thread and wished him well in his publishing efforts.

After all I did for him, and the feedback he offered while I helped him, I’m truly dismayed that he considered the results less than satisfying. That’s certainly not the way he expressed himself when I was working with him.

I can only assume his resulting dissatisfaction came from me signing off from the discussion.

Let me emphasize: I provide support to Adobe’s user forums for free, and I make my living helping clients with their Adobe software problems. And while I wouldn’t have expressed myself as sharply as Michel did, I’d be lying if I didn’t say the same thoughts didn’t occur to me. I don’t provide my clients 7 hours of free support before I turn on the clock, and it isn’t fair to my paying clients or myself for me to do it through Adobe’s forums. I’ve gotta make a living too.

Jack, I’m sorry you feel dissatisfied with what you got from me. If you’d like, you may contact me through my LinkedIn profile and I’ll be happy to do everything I can to address all your needs at my contracted rate. There’s no obligation, of course.

And in closing, please have mercy on the ACPs who offer their assistance on Adobe’s user forums. They’re offering their help out of the kindness of their hearts, and I can assure you that you’re getting far more from them than you’re paying for.