Just got to ask did you get paid for your time? Did you do something for free that a Google employee could have been paid for? Are you retired or something or lost a job and looking to volunteer for things you can put on your resume? I do not mean to get in your grill I am asking because I just do not know.
Or to put it another way, what did you do but perform free work for Google? From another angle, do you think they are not spending enough money for accurate information, or that they care enough about getting things right to improve errors in their maps unless you intervene? Sorry it might sound not right, it is just that these are issues I would like to know more about.
I was at the supermarket once around Passover and saw a “kosher for Passover” label erroneously affixed to something not appropriate. I called the manager and pointed it out and we discussed some of the nuances of the holiday.
Should I have been paid for my time? I had factual info the store benefited from on a topic important to me. Why was that not a positive thing to have done?
Mister Rik had some pride in the fact that the road was named after his family. He saw someone spelling it wrong and he corrected them. It’s not like Google profited in any way from him correction.
If you want to insist that he should only have done it for profit, then look at it this way: his payment was seeing his family name being given the respect it deserves. From his post it sounds like he’s quite happy with that payment. Who are you to question that?
The fact that you evaluate everything based on the monetary value makes you just as bad as any of the places you are trying to decry. He already told you what he got out of it–that he got something fixed that he cared about–and it took him maybe a minute to send a freaking email.
You’re trying to make him feel bad for spending a few fucking cents worth of his time doing something he found valuable–not that all time is worth the same, anyways. It was obviously his free time. He wouldn’t have been making money doing something else in that mere minute of his time.
And at least Google spent actual money fixing the problem, correcting their mistakes. You were told that your comments were just raining on the guy for no reason, but you doubled down and started “just asking questions.”
I’ve probably spent more time trying to fight your ignorance on this crap than he spent actually getting the issue fixed. Should I not have worked for free for you and let you keep making this mistake until you finally figured it out and fixed it yoruself? Or should I try to make the world a slightly better place while at the same time helping you out so you won’t unnecessarily piss people off in the future?
What he got out of it is in every comment of congratulations, including mine. Congratulations, Mister Rik, for getting your childhood home named correctly on Google. I really appreciate people who see problems and fix them instead of whining about how it should have already been fixed.
And it’s also not like some guy at Google is sitting there and typing in the names of all the streets, and they saved some money by having Mister Rik do the proofreading for them that they would otherwise be doing. I’m pretty sure Google just feeds in the data (street names, etc) that they buy, and have to be content to take it as it is. Only if someone cares enough to point out an error are they going to be concerned enough to change something. A lot of companies wouldn’t even do that.
Given that The Straight Dope is all about fighting “ignorance”, this was a chance for ME to fight ignorance. “Ignorance” is not “stupidity”. Ignorance is simply a state of “not knowing”. In this specific case, I was not ignorant; I had the knowledge and the facts, and I simply shared them with Google. I don’t expect Google’s bots to “know”, I expect them to simply read the information they’ve been given. In this instance, they had been given the wrong information, and I corrected that information. And when my correction actually resulted in results, I counted it as a “victory”. I had fought ignorance.
Thanks, and brilliantly stated
I’m merely carrying on a family tradition. When the county first put up the road sign, they misspelled the family name, and some of my older relatives, decades ago, raised holy hell to get the street sign corrected.
It doesn’t help that there are at least five legitimate ways to spell our name. But this is how we spell it. Heh. I checked my box at work today, and found a letter addressed to me, as head of my department, and it spelled my last name, “Osbourn”. It was junk mail, so it didn’t matter, but goddam, do people even actually read what’s in front of them? I spell my first name, R-I-K, and people will reply to my e-mails, with my name spelled out right there in front of them, and still address me as “R-I-C”.
I think we are way too far apart here. I understand the situation to be that, if Google had not screwed up, he would not have had to go to any trouble. The correction of their mistake cost him time and effort. What is there to be happy about that unless you are Google, not him?
You said you fought Google and won, I say you spent time correcting their mistake to their benefit.
15 seconds or not, how would you not have been better off if Google had just gotten it right in the first place? My thought is that what happened was a problem, and I think you do too – after all you were unhappy enough about it to want it changed. Yet Google benefited from your help. So my thought is that Google made a mistake but came out better than it might have because you helped them out. You, on the other hand, were caused enough annoyance by their mistake that you had to go to the effort of having it corrected. Where is the win in that?
I notified them that they had the hospital in the wrong place - they had it in the location that closed circa 1997 when the new one opened out the other side of town. I never heard back from them, but they corrected the map. If they could only do one thing or the other, they did the right one.
So what’s the solution? Should he have left the mistake? She he have billed them for his time and then sued them when they refused to pay? She he have told them he had found a mistake but he’d only tell them what it is if they paid him?
How would you have handled it, if the street name was important to you on a personal level?
I’m trying to get MapQuest to remove a non-existent road from my neighborhood. I have no idea why it showed up - there never was a road in that spot. Google Maps doesn’t show it and whatever software Garmin used for our GPS doesn’t show it.
Makes me wonder if someone, somewhere, was screwing around and started an office pool: “How long till someone calls us on this??”
It only takes one typo for there to be dueling official sources of information about what a street is called. Sometimes the local government’s property map, the sign on the street, and what the post office calls the street differ. And then there are data entry errors at the map data company.