Linux-loving lecturer 'lost' email, was actually confused by Outlook Friday means a few things at El Reg: a new BOFH. A couple of beers. And another instalment of On-Call, our weekly column in which we take reader-contributed tales of being asked to do horrible things for horrible people, scrub them up and hope you click. This week, meet “Newt” who a dozen or more years ago worked at a College …
you mean in 2 weeks?
If any of the I.T staff were any good the one who recieved the first communication should have instantly replied with "Click on the little cross to collapse the folders" before doing any investigation, let alone visiting the person.
Same when user says my files are missing. - look in the nearest folder.
Oh I've been there done that. A one time employer was moving everyone from Groupwise to Outlook. My job as part of this was to go and help users slim down their mailboxes. Some people had only 1GB some had the full 4GB and there was normally no need to convert everything over. That included those NSFW emails with the large GIF attachments, powerpoint files where every version of a 10MB presentation up to and including the final one were there. So with one of the really heavy users I said we'd archive all those attachments from the year dot onto a CDRom (or six) and they'd be able to find them there. This wasn't really work stuff and therefore there was no need to keep it on any of our hardware but it was stuff she needed. We select the first lot of files that she really couldn't do without and put them onto the burner software. At her insistence we left the disc open so that she could add a text file with something relevant to the files in it.
I said I'd be back presently to do the next disc and went for a quick coffee. When I returned she was looking at me and shouted "All my files aren't on the disc!" I told her to calm down and explain what she meant by this please. She had taken the disc which had finished burning put it into her laptop (with a CDRom drive only) and couldn't see the files. She'd just deleted the files off her computer and now "everything is gone you IDIOT" This was in an open plan office with a load of people watching and I wasn't impressed. I opened the recycle bin and restored her files to where they had been to her utter amazement. I then took the disc out of her laptop and put it back in the CDRW drive and showed her that her files were on the disc. Explained that they wouldn't show up on her laptop until she'd added her text file and we finalised the disc. She said in a nice loud voice that I wasn't an idiot and she was very sorry then in a lower tone asked how I'd found her deleted files. She'd never seen the recycle bin before and found somethings in there that she thought were long gone and a couple of NSFW pictures a girlfriend had sent her that she'd "deleted straight away". Yeah she'd deleted them but not before she'd downloaded them onto her computer.
Whilst everyone here knows about treeview, clearly the lecturer didn't and presumably neither did his colleages, to me this clearly suggests lack of what should have been necessary user training.
Unlike IT, where most emails are at best read once and thrown away, most professional academic correspondance is very very important, this is not mentioned and I suggest understood by the author.
When your words are your repretation then having them disappear is indeed a major disaster, that the local IT support left the lecturer in panic for weeks until the author returned suggests that the lack of product training/understanding extended to the support staff as well.
Having seen similar balls ups where systems that have worked for years are ripped out and replaced with a new system seemingly because the non-IT purse holder has been to some expo and believed the BS that said interface is intuitive then my sympathies are with the lecturer.
I too, have been out to a number of problems that were actually down to lack of user training and were resolved (on paper) by a single click. It did not make me feel clever or superior meerly ashamed and embaressed for being associated with such a fkup.
@AC - One major flaw is to assume users are familiar with many of the conventions used by a particular OS and that migrating from one to another is always trivial for the user. There will be certain amount of hand-holding required with each user as they learn the quirks of the new system.
@Anonymous Coward:"Unlike IT, where most emails are at best read once and thrown away, most professional academic correspondance is very very important, this is not mentioned and I suggest understood by the author."
One simple rule:
If your shit is important to you. BACK IT UP YOURSELF!
Don't make it somebody else's responsibility. Because it's not.
Even more important: IF YOUR SHIT IS IMPORTANT, DON'T STORE IT IN AN EMAIL FOLDER!
If you're treating an email folder as though it is a filestore, you're not competant to be using the computer. If the days of typewriters did you keep your sole only copy of your thesis in your letterbox?
"IF YOUR SHIT IS IMPORTANT, DON'T STORE IT IN AN EMAIL FOLDER! If you're treating an email folder as though it is a filestore, you're not competant [sic] to be using the computer."Shouty, shouty! So where would you store emails that are sent out on a regular basis in response to email queries about your work, or business? In the days of typewriters we kept such documents in the form of photocopies in a filing cabinet when we were responding to snail-mail. Presumably you would have had the typist typing each one out as the queries arrived...
@Snorlax and "If your shit is important to you. BACK IT UP YOURSELF!"
I agree that everyone responsible should be certain that important stuff is backed up but then again that is part of what they normally are paying IT support for.
Why not just decentralise everything and return to isolated machines without network connectivity? the answer is because it is too expensive in redundant hardware and limiting on team based working. Then add in that for security reasons that data tends to be centralised with controlled access against just taking the storage out of the PC along with all the backups and walking out.
If you do understand that you need to deal with the customers requirements then you are not going to work for long in pretty much any field.
That's me. A lot.
Despite my supposedly high IQ, if something isn't exactly (and I mean within a millimetre) of where I expect it to be, I can't see it, in fact I can spend literally months looking for it to no avail, with it sitting there right in front of my face.
My uninformed theory is that the whole concept of "IQ" is deeply flawed, and that everyone's brain is just wired differently, with some better at certain kinds of tasks and worse at others. I'm definitely with Sir Ken Robinson on that one.
Conventional wisdom dictates that I should be terrible at pattern recognition, but that isn't the case. I just seem to be better at finding things I'm not looking for. This is the main reason that I've given up wearing socks.
I moved off XP to Linux and chose Evolution. No problems at all. I also moved someone else over. Despite my setting things up such that they make 'sense' I still have to repeatedly go back and set them up so that they make sense. I have no idea what the person is doing in the interim periods in order to make things not make sense.
Sorry. I am renowned for my clarity. When I moved off XP to Linux I was offered Thunderbird by default and thought Meh, it was a bit 'shouty'. Evolution was closer to Outhouse and over three upgrades I have had no issues with it.
I have had no problems setting up Evolution such that it made sense for myself. It's the other user who, despite my efforts, keeps messing things up which is kind of in line with the article. I guess they would have the same problems with Thunderbird.
Either way I am becoming proficient at identifying what they may have clicked on in order to mess things up so I can put things back together again.
One of our company directors regularly deletes important emails, and then swears blind he never touched them.
Invariably we find them in his deleted items folder, and restore them, and every time he says "well I don't know how that happened!".
No-one has yet dared to respond "because you're an idiot" out loud, but it's only a matter of time.
It's Outlook on a Mac.
It is nice of you to try and find him a technical excuse, but he's just not safe to be let near technology, really :) He's also the most likely member of staff to click on attachments in dodgy emails, or forget his domain password every time he logs in.
We bought him a Mac in self defense, as at least it's less likely to lead to a network wide infection when he screws up.
We had a user who kept coiming back to us at least once a week saying ALL his emails had disappeared. We found them all in Deleted Items, and after a few weeks of this, we had a proper look at his laptop, and found that the keyboard hadn't been installed correctly, and the delete key was ever so slightly proud... so that when he closed the lid with Outlook open, the screen would press delete and remove everything for him.
We bought him a Mac in self defense, as at least it's less likely to lead to a network wide infection when he screws up.
@alister - see that was your problem. You shouldn't have bought him a Mac, you should have bought him an Etch-a-Sketch...
You shouldn't have bought him a Mac, you should have bought him an Etch-a-Sketch...
I used to threaten one of my managers with an Etch-a-Sketch, from time to time. He had the most amazing ability to mess up his laptop in strange, new and baffling ways. I bought one and was going to replace his laptop, when he was on vacation, but at the last moment I chickened out.
I still think I should have done it.
My old boss, (an experienced IT manager who'd worked his way up, so not just a random user) used to basically delete every email unless it represented a current task. If he needed an old email, he'd just go search in the deleted items.
He was most annoyed when I empted his deleted emails without thinking, but had to admit that it was entirely his fault for having such a non-standard workflow.
(and M, if you're reading, sorry, but I'll stop taking the piss when you start using your inbox like a regular person ;)
If it were possible to post screenshots here- I could show you a deleted folder- with over 120,000 e-mails and god only knows how many folders and subdirectories in it.
The user claims it works for him- perhaps it does- not sure how many of us have accidentally cleaned out his deleted items folder in the past though- its definitely a few of us.
Honestly- I reckon these users have to be related to one another!
"Honestly- I reckon these users have to be related to one another!"
Probably not but they do train each other, especially if IT doesn't make the effort to do so themselves.
I can't imagine why they think it's a good idea but it seems to have been something that's happened for years so IT really should be aware of it and try to break the cycle by emphasising that what goes into Deleted can't be assured of coming out again.
"outlook has never implemented a single-key "I'm done; file this email" button. "That's because Outlook can't read your mind. Right click, choose Quick Steps, choose a Quick Step which can do any of several things such as:
* generate an email to the team,
* mark as read and move to a particular folder,
* reply and delete...
"Don't know why you've been downvoted. My boss has insisted we implement a "4D" strategy for email"There are people in IT who see their role as preventing the worker bees from doing their work efficiently. Note all the badmouthing of sales by those oblivious of the fact that without sales there's no revenue stream which is where their wages come from.
Outlook might not be the best CRM out there, but since it comes bundled with Office it's certainly the most widely used. Not that the majority of Outlook users know they have a passable CRM that can make their workflow more efficient if only they had the training...
"Probably not but they do train each other, especially if IT doesn't make the effort to do so themselves.
I can't imagine why they think it's a good idea but it seems to have been something that's happened for years"
That's because the vast majority of companies don't do training after the initial HR H&S and Procedures induction. Especially in SMEs, which are the majority of employers. People *may* be shown how new kit works or new software works by the people doing the installation, but that's about it. But then the people who "know" move on and the new people are expected to learn by osmosis. It wasn't quite so bad when computers were first coming into the work place because no one knew how they worked, but even then, many learned by read the manuals (for you kids, they were paper books that told you all you needed to know). Nowadays, it's simply assumed that staff know what they are doing because "well, everybody uses computers these days"
If he needed an old email, he'd just go search in the deleted items.
I have asked users before, "would you keep your lunch in the trash can?" Then I spent some time showing them how to use mailbox folders or archives.
I never really liked the archives because they were always stored in the local Application Data (or %localappdata%) directory which is not subject to roaming profiles or folder redirection. If the user moved to a new computer the archive PST would have to be moved manually, or worse if the computer tanked it was lost. Storing the PST in "My Documents" is not much better because Outlook has the habit of continuing to run after its GUI is closed, thus holding open PSTs which would wreak havoc with roaming profiles in particular since users have the habit of logging off or shutting down without closing programs.
It rather amuses me how Outlook now likes to use the "Outlook files" folder in "My Documents" and Microsoft encourages the use of redirected folders, considering Microsoft also warns against using PST files over the network. (Unfortunately, the blog post link in that article is no longer a direct link but can be found in plenty of other resources. GFI has a really nice write-up on this.)
"He was most annoyed when I empted his deleted emails without thinking, but had to admit that it was entirely his fault for having such a non-standard workflow."
Back in the days that a 250MB disk drive cost what I paid for my first house, I used to set up a daily job to delete compiler and utility listings with a file extension of ".LIS" or ".LST", and various others which denoted temporary files which both took up lots of space and could be easily regenerated.
Along comes the user who thinks that he's above naming conventions and was writing memos with those extensions.
Oops.
I managed to survive his complaints to management with ease, and rub his nose in it at the same time.
He was one of life's back stabbers, so justice was done :-)
> Along comes the user who thinks that he's above naming
> conventions and was writing memos with those extensions.
As opposed to an admin who thinks he's above user preference?
Who are you to dictate file extensions? What if he didn't want to use them at all? What if he had never heard of those particular extensions. What if another program used the same extensions?
You remind me of the admin who blindly deleted someones file called "penis" that contained biological research data.
He didn't get away with it. I'm surprised that you did.
>As opposed to an admin who thinks he's above user preference?
Extensions isn't a user preference, that's decided by OS and software makers. A bit like putting bleach in a bottle labeled milk.
Who are you to dictate file extensions?
>Admins don't it's the software makers
>What if he didn't want to use them at all?
What if he wanted to drive on the other side of the road.
>What if he had never heard of those particular extensions. What if another program used the same extensions?
That's why you don't make you own extensions, as he picked one which meant this is not need and can be deleted.
Not that I go around deleting files. But I do have to deal with people asking me to open files because they can't as the extension is wrong. So they get this file is corrupt or unknown file. Luckly most modern common files I can identify looking at the raw file as they have a 4 byte identifier. But not all software providers include sech an identifer in there file format.
Also I've seen backup software have default exclusion of file extensions of known temporary files. And of course emails clients and email security software will block attachments of a whole load of extension which identify files which contain code. A lot more than I can list.
Suprising how often this happens on an urgent email sent by someone as they just go on holiday.
These days with more of this stuff in the cloud your admin won't have control to override this. Cloud provider may say they just don't have that option. Like you can't send certain things in the post.
I think story was from a time when extensions where less standard and the risk lower.
As opposed to an admin who thinks he's above user preference?
Who are you to dictate file extensions? What if he didn't want to use them at all? What if he had never heard of those particular extensions. What if another program used the same extensions?
Okay, I'll bite. Your last assertion seems valid, but cannot validate the rest of the shenanigans in your post. If a user wants to name paper files which exist in a complete vacuum relative to standards, that is how someone wants to file their papers is generally an arbitrary choice, then that is fine. However, if users want to maintain data in an environment which consists of standards then it most certainly is the admin's responsibility to ensure the users stay withing those standards, or at least in most cases it should be safe to assume those standards are valid and followed.
Of course, we know how assumptions work, so it is also the responsibility of the admin the event that valid data is affected by such automated processes. As a matter of policy I do not delete data in customer use areas and leave that up to the users, even in times when space is low and I have to guide the user through the process I stay away from the liability.
I will agree that if the admin acts maliciously in a this-will-teach-them approach, without ever having taken the time to advise or guide the user, said admin is not meeting his responsibility, but certainly, yes, standards trump the user's preferences, especially for forward usability.
You remind me of the admin who blindly deleted someones file called "penis" that contained biological research data.
He didn't get away with it. I'm surprised that you did.
This is not even close to the same thing. If someone wants to put the name "penis" in their files, then so be it, even more so in a biological research environment. Stipulation this is a real even in the first place and your retelling of the tale is a 100% true representation of the event, the admin who did this sounds like a penis, himself.
I won't say that it was "entirely his fault for having such a non-standard workflow". It was just as much your own fault, for not having the wisdom, the intelligence or the experience to realize that users will do all kinds of stuff...
It's a 50/50 case. You were at fault, he was at fault.
It's important to remember that users are never at fault for not having the same amount of IT-knowledge as you do yourself. If they did have the same amount, they'd be doing your job, and they'd be your colleagues.
Nah, I've done it.
had to enforce the emptying of recycle bin on exit, sent round *lots* of emails advising people, asking them to sign off that they'd read and understood it.
Got a shitogram from the MD's son because 'all my important emails have gone', said idiot was in the habit of putting all his read emails in the recycle bin but opened them from there if he needed to read them again.
I called him an idiot, in front of his dad and a few members of staff.
This was the same idiot who wrestled the advertising copy role out of the hands of a graduate who could read, write and spell to replace it with semi-literate drivel.
After three issues of the national magazine they spent a not insignificant amount on advertising with his father persuaded the graduate to 'proof read' all future advertising copy.
Moron.
collapsing folders and complaining that everything is gone - check
deleting emails/folders and complaining that they don't know what happened - check
dragging items/folders into other locations and not being able to find them - check
users (and helplessdesk staff) not being able to use the search function to find items - check
users complaining that the never received an email (and being proven wrong) - check
junk mail settings that the user configured causing emails to disappear - check
helpdesk staff restoring most of a mailbox because the user insisted that everything was gone (just moved) - check
users complaining that they are not able to send/receive email, because they have ignored the warnings every day for the last 3 months about the quota - check
Been in the game so long (as many of us have), that I have seen just about every form of stupidity users can come up with for email (not limited to Exchange and Outlook either).
I think that if I'd encountered that individual, he would have been told succinctly exactly where he could shove his attitude, before showing him exactly how stupid he was being.
Then I would have torn my boss a new one, and my colleagues, all while pointing out that we had backups of the PST files for this very reason (assuming he had actually lost any emails).
yep - every time i thought that i'd seen it all, someone came up with another way to screw up.
that's why I said "just about every form of stupidity" - but not every variant on that stupidity
:D
luckily, I only deal with servers, project managers and other techs
of course that does present a whole new level of stupidity and its own problems
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