[Short] How a tiny insignificant Microsoft feature halted an entire Accounts department for a day.

And other such stories.
Our Accounts dept runs from 9am to 5pm. My own dept runs from 4pm til 8am (with a shift change in the middle)

Much of our accounts dept’s work depends on a set of files generated at the end of business for my dept.

Well today I arrived at 4pm to find an email requesting those files. After doing some unrelated work that is usually waiting for me when I get in I got around to investigating (I always do. It involves finding out why they didn’t get the files and taking steps to minimize the risk of/avoid it happening in future)

Well it seems the files did get sent. Strange. No reported problems either from my staff. Stranger.
So I have a look at the destination of the files. They’re sat there, as normal as night coming after day.

What on earth is going on.

So I go to the computer of the person asking for the files. I bring up the destination folder on their machine. It’s a Microsoft Outlook public folder.

I can see files for the day after. I can see files for the day before. But no files for the day in question.

What on earth!?
So I look closer.
One of the minuses isn’t a minus. It’s a plus.

I click the plus.

Abracadabra, shala-zam, bish bash bosh. There are the files!
So it turns out the poor guy sat waiting all day because Microsoft Outlook was all of sunday’s files from him.
Have thee a similar story to tell? It would be amusing I am sure. (probably more amusing than mine I excpect)

I used to do phone support for MS. Yeah, I have stories.

One that came up pretty often is that no text would show up anywhere. “Windows is broken, it stole all of my text!” What invariably happened is that the user (or a jokester friend) turned their text color to white.