A visit from Intuit

The other day I got a call from Intuit. They were calling to ask if I would like to participate in a product development interview. At first, I was a little dubious and as I was really busy that day I almost gave the woman on the other end of the phone the brush off. I get a lot of junk calls during the day and unfortunately, I have hardened myself to random and weird telephone calls. Like the guy who called looking for broken harddrives, as if I were to have those hanging around, the woman who wanted to sell me barrels of wine in bulk, and don't get me started on the thousands of refinancing-your-mortgage calls! But, I liked the sound of this woman's voice and her delivery, so I continued to listen for a few moments more. She asked if I infact used the software Quicken and if it would be okay if three program software developers were to come to my office and discuss the merits of Quicken. She was even willing to pay me for my efforts. I thought, hey great. This might be kind of fun. They come to me, ask me a bunch of questions, let me demonstrate a couple of things that I do with the program and then give me money. What could be better.

It was after I arranged the meeting that I began to think twice about my decision. I started to actually regret the pending interview, especially when I received the email that asked if I would mind if they video taped the session. Panic set it. While I am an avid user of Quicken I realized that I am just a basic user. Quicken is my electronic checkbook and I use it to link to my bank and download transactions. When I first became a Quicken user a million years ago, I was distracted by the flashy graphing, forecasting and budget planning features and used to play around with them frequently. But, these days, I don't really use any of that anymore. I am just so darn busy and only use the program to keep balances, input checks and keep a general pulse on our finances. I thought, great! They are going to come all the way out to my office, they will plug in their camera and then we will all just sit there smiling at each other, and I will have absolutely nothing to say.

But, I perservered and didn't call to cancel the appointment. In the end it actually all turned out pretty okay, that is after the initial weirdness of having a camera focused on me. I got a chance to meet part of the software development team and I have to say they are pretty normal people, and I even got them to crack a few smiles here and there. They were really interested how I used the program, what I liked about it, what I didn't like and what could be done differently. We had a good session. Turned out I had more to say than I thought. I always do, sigh.

Now, if I could just get someone from Macromedia to call me...now, that is the software development team that I would REALLY like to have all to myself in my office for an entire afternoon! I am taking calls...