Stepping Up to the Plate

Credit where credit is due our friends at Medium came through

I recently had an issue with constantly getting kicked off my Medium mobile app, so when I tried to respond to posts I was being mistaken for a nonmember.

I have gone back and forth with Arthur from the Medium team who has been patient and persistent in troubleshooting and identifying the problem. I wrote an article previously about it which you can see here.

I’m here to tell you Arthur has managed to get to the bottom of it, and I thought I’d share this for anyone else having a similar issue. My problem is I would check my notifications from my stats page. So when I would try to respond to any of my notifications to the comment or profile I wanted to respond to, it would suddenly ask if I wanted the Medium app as if I were a nonpaying nonmember.

For those who don’t already know, the correct place to check and respond to your notifications is from the top right bell on the home screen, and not from the top right bell on your stats page. Arthur is attempting to remove the bell altogether on the stats page to avoid confusion.

Now, I am not a person with a lot of positive-sounding instruments in my musical repertoire. (I know, I know, I’m working on it.) I blame my 9–5 job where I field complaints all day like a harried shortstop playing behind a bad pitcher.

This grumpy propensity isn’t helped by the fact that Medium refuses to curate any of my exceptional prose or poetry, so I have to work twice as hard to get my stuff circulated, read, or seen. Even though I’m relatively new on Medium, after dedicating 25 good years of my life to my craft, it feels like a slap in the face. And when I see lesser quality being curated, something inside me starts to growl. I’m like a wounded tiger looking for a fight.

Before you accuse me of arrogance or delusion, let me qualify my statement by saying it is not only my own work I feel is often better written than some (not all) of the curated pieces I’ve seen getting recirculated ad nauseum on the home screen feed, but a lot of other tragically neglected, well-written, brilliant pieces on Medium, too. As flawed as I am, I try to be at least half-objective. (I’m also half laughing at myself and my dumb luck). Just ask David Perlmutter if my stuff shouldn’t be better circulated. (Thank you, David).

Anyway, back to the point of this story. I had to make an exception from my normal grumpy inclination for Arthur here at Medium. I have worked similar jobs where I had to patiently troubleshoot with an anxious customer (I at least tried to be cooperative and diplomatic) and can tell you it is not an easy task.

Well done, Arthur, and thanks for fixing my problem.

© Carlo Zeno 2022

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Thank you for reading, and thank you to Arthur at Medium for his excellent customer service, and to the team at Illumination for continuing to publish my erratic niche-defying pieces. If you’d like to support me, consider buying me a coffee and/or reading two more pieces below. Thanks again.