Heh. That actually happens sometimes, but I’m not part of the group (management) that gets to revise those procedures. On the rare occasion that a procedure is revised, a couple of people produce and approve the document, which is then sent to the entire department for ‘training’ purposes - we have to read the document and sign a paper. It’s the worst when you find a typo in a document that has already been revised.
Oh, we’re the opposite; this is very much a “But we’ve always done it that way, why are we changing???” shop.
This incident didn’t happen at my specific workplace and I’ve never heard it so extreme. Yet I’ve had many people occasionally explode in my similar line of work. Clients forget that the employee’s mandated to take some specific action. It’s human nature to get defensive but this conflagration would be the biggest hazard of this job by far.
For 6 months I’ve been warning people that how they read email is going to change. Most of these people are not students or employees, I’m not paid to provide them email.
In July I warned that anyone I’d not heard back from would have their mail moved on August 2. Suddenly, the day after someone is moved (it went in batches), I’m getting snippy emails about how they’re very upset it is gone, and how important it is, and how they use it all the time.
They use it so much, and it’s so important that they couldn’t bother to read any of my previous messages explaining how to access it in the new location, or ask for help in the month ahead of the deadline.
In the time it’s taken me to write this post, I could have replied with instructions, but it’s after hours, so I’ll whine to you people and let them stew until morning.
Ooo, fun with email! Corporate IT suspended their email retention (and automatic deletion) policy when we transitioned to the new system, so most employees have emails in their inboxes dating back to 2018 or so. IT sent out an email yesterday outlining this policy, noting that it will be effective…soon. Ok. The last time they did this, they weren’t very clear about when the policy would go back into effect, and loads of people lost all of their emails older than a few months. Yes, there is an archive option available; this is Outlook-based email, and automatic deletion doesn’t touch emails in archives.
Before we left for the summer, I told a teacher their credential was going to expire in about 7 months, so here is how you collect the paperwork you need to renew. Get all of that together and there should be no problems in August when we get back and I’ll help you get through the actual renewal process.
So while in Europe on vacation this summer I get the text, “HOLY SHIT!!! I got notified my credential is going to expire. What do I do?! HELP ME!”
My company has a policy to delete emails after 60 days.
Our Idiot Project Managers make no effort to retain any customer requests or communications during quotes and sales.
As a result, by the time the quote is made, sent to the customer, signed, sent back, a purchase order is issued and received and the project is greenlit to go to Engineering, there’s no record of what the customer was even asking for.
So Engineering has the pleasure of getting the PMs to set up a call so we can ask the customer what the fuck he thinks he’s paying us for (because, often, the actual resolution to the problem would be better another way).
Speaking of terrible corporate email policies, the whole-company email list is not restricted enough. Of course yet again, some nitwit sent out a very specific email to literally the entire company.
I’m sure you all know what happens next. A bunch of even dumberasses, who’d not normally have access to that distribution list, reply-all to it. With emails ranging from “why me” to “take me off this list” to pure snarkiness. Did it occur to them that their boss, their boss’s boss, etc, all the way up to the CEO is seeing their stupidity?
It looks like IT nuked the whole email chain. Better late than never.
If Donald Trump put on his platform that he’d issue an executive order that all email programs must add a dialog to the “Reply-To-All” button saying “Are you sure? Your email will be going out to 73,241 email addresses. That sounds like an awful lot for someone at your paygrade” I still wouldn’t vote for him, but at least I’d be tempted.
I am so jealous. I just did a quick search, and the oldest mail folder on our system was last written to in 1990. Some may predate that, but the system only records last written date, not creation date. The oldest email probably goes back into the 80s. I wonder if there is anything using ! paths?
I can absolutely guarantee that some of the professors have mail in their inboxes older than some of their graduate students.
It’s Friday - and you know what that means. Yet another manufactured emergency. A switch in Georgia has been in simplex (only one SS7 link is working - you should have at least two) for weeks. The NOC has been dragging their asses on fixing the modem card in the CSU/DSU. The Ops manager has now made it my group’s problem, because he found out that the RAD FCD IP can act as both a modem and a channel bank for SS7 - as long the switch is a Nortel DMS-10.
The problem is: RAD no longer makes the FCD IP, and the very few we have on hand have already been earmarked for upcoming projects. My afternoon has consisted of scrounging for spares. All for a switch with fewer than 300 subscribers that is set to be decommed anyway.
Meanwhile, my team lead is responding to the email thread with “Maus, make sure you do this. Maus - make sure you do that.” I just wrote him back saying, “Dude - give me more that three minutes to write out detailed instructions for the field tech to follow once the box gets to him.”
Fuck it - I’m going upstairs to make my pizza crust.
I worked with a woman (Hi Kelly!) who I’m pretty sure had a copy of every email she’d ever sent or received. Not sure how she managed it across the various mandates on retention and archival rules. But things would go to shit, someone would try to blame our team, and she’d forward out an email from 7 years ago documenting that they’d been told about that exact scenario and either agreed with how it was handled, accepted the risk instead of paying to mitigate it, or (if they were upstream from us, which most everyone was (and as last in line we were always the presumptive problem)) that they would never send us data with that particular configuration.
I do, excluding undergrad in the early 90s. Many of the people here do as well, and it is good for similar reasons. Often not the ass covering, as you describe, but frequently to answer other questions. Why did we use that instrument to collect data all those years ago? Look in email, and find the old discussion about it.
My feeling is that even decades of email is usually only 10s of gigabytes, so it isn’t worth anyone’s time to go through and try and figure out what to keep and what to delete. If it is too much space, you can probably just delete the 100 largest attachments, and cut the size in half.
In my department, the most important emails end up as backup material for reports, so they’re pretty much saved forever (or until someone revises the report and decides the email is no longer relevant). Of course, there’s no way to search for the content of the email, so you’ll only see it if you’re reading the report for a particular part number.
We’ve had enough of those over the years that I’ve made a habit of keeping my own little email archives for project-related emails. It’s paid off more than once. (I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on the Project Managers; my company’s method for logging project-related emails is extremely time consuming.)
I certainly retain my own copies of emails that contain key points or decisions, partially to remember as the project goes on, but also to cover my ass (“yes you did agree to this per your email on January 17”).
But how the sales and project guys can gather customer info, quote it, get it accepted, and hand the project to engineeringwithout retaining any record of the request and agreement is mind-boggling. The quotes themselves don’t include a full scope of work, so they aren’t remotely helpful.
These idiots also don’t understand why I ask them to get the customer to tell us the legal entity they work for. If I’m getting government forms for the customer, it’s probably best to know they are Steven Smith at ABC Flights LLC at a given address, and not just "Steve, at ABC’', who I’ve never heard of.
Also, to add to this rant - I went on vacation for two weeks. I sent and email to someone internally and asked the PM to follow up during my absence as the customer needs to plan actions in response. NO ONE RESPONDED. Two fucking weeks and nothing got done, because these fucking man-children can’t be arsed to read their emails and do their jobs without me hounding them and reminding them as if I’m their mother.
Don’t even get me started. So many times my email archives have save my ass, if not the company’s ass, because I retained them. Nothing like a paper trail to ease my stress level. And if they can’t do their job, that’s on them, I have proof I tried.
This is how fast the world has changed. Not all THAT long ago, I’d teach students and coworkers to organize their files, then backup and delete most files and emails.
We were getting hard drives too full when we had MEGAbytes of data.
I remember upping the drive space on our graphics PCs and Macs from 40 to 80 or 100MB, and that was a hard sell to the bosses.
Move those files to your cinderblock-sized “portable” drives, or your 8x11" 20MB Bernoulli Cartridges!
The organization I work for actually does this. I once needed to do a massive reply all and received a popup stating something along the lines of “This email has xxxx recipients. Are you sure?”
I still advocate the the original sender should have a button “Allow reply all” on emails with above a certain recipient count threshold.
It wasn’t that long ago, but it was also 30 years ago. I still don’t understand how that works.
It was space concerns that originally had us running our own departmental mail server. We had people with inboxes larger than the university’s mail quota. We just paid to provide more space when it was needed.
University mail got better, at like 5-10GB quota, which would have been fine for 80% of our users, but if I have to run a mail server for that last 20%, I may as well run it for everyone. Now it is a 100GB quota, and my largest user was about 45GB.
New but related rant.
So I send someone an email that is a decision tree of directions.
Go to the web page. Do you see the right page? Then continue, else let’s get you to the right page.
Are you entering your account name correctly? Make sure it looks just like this.
Do you see the right password page? If not let’s debug that.
Enter your password. Is it correct? If not go here to reset it.
Total waste of my time. I need to send each instruction in its own email, one at a time.
After about 6 emails where I just slowly restate each step in the original email, but one at a time, we’re finally up to “it doesn’t recognize my password.” Great, now it’s not my problem, contact the general help desk to get it reset, which, of course, was explained in the very first email.
Oh, and of course each reply mail does nothing to confirm whether or not the previous step worked, but I think maybe it did, because there are new problems that seem to be from the next step, but could be caused by screwing up the previous step, too.
Just tell me what you saw, then what did you did, then what you saw after that?
I swear the retirees are just bored, but, you know, not so bored they read a whole email.
That actually happens sometimes, but I’m not part of the group (management) that gets to revise those procedures. On the rare occasion that a procedure is revised, a couple of people produce and approve the document, which is then sent to the entire department for ‘training’ purposes - we have to read the document and sign a paper. It’s the worst when you find a typo in a document that has already been revised.