Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss
- Reference: 1689319871
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/07/14/on_call/
- Source link:
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Curtis" who shared a tale from the late 1990s when he worked for a colossal multinational consumer goods conglomerate.
One of the tasks that landed on Curtis's desk was installing Outlook on laptops used by senior management – because the version of Lotus Mail they were using wouldn't survive Y2K. When a colleague got wind of that job, he suggested that Curtis might as well kill two birds with one stone and upgrade the OS, as the firm had just started rolling out a custom build of Windows NT.
[1]
"I duly recruited a team of long-term unemployed (the company was keen to do this), trained them up and set them to work," Curtis wrote.
[2]
[3]
Curtis and his recruits devised a process that started with a polite request that users delete unnecessary email and data, as disk-to-disk transfer rates were glacial at time.
That speed mattered, because the next step in the process was to collect the laptop at the close of business, whereupon it would be backed up to a temporary location before a replacement hard disk was inserted and the spanking new OS and Outlook installed.
[4]
Mail and files would then be restored from the backup, and when the boss arrived the next morning they'd find a new machine humming along nicely.
Curtis was cautious: the old hard drive was placed in secure storage "until we were certain that all had gone well."
He admitted to On Call that this was perhaps an unduly laborious process – but it was resilient.
[5]
All went well for the first couple of weeks.
Then one morning the phone rang. One of the top three execs in the UK office was not happy with his refreshed laptop, which needed attention now .
Curtis dispatched his most tactful team member, who returned twenty minutes later scarcely able to speak amid bouts of laughter.
[6]Nobody does DR tests to survive lightning striking twice
[7]Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris
[8]False negative stretched routine software installation into four days of frustration
[9]That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse
When Curtis got the story out of him it started with a description of an oak-panelled office with walls covered in larger-than-life paintings of the company founders. A personal assistant ushered the techie in to the presence of the executive, who had allowed his frustration to boil over into "screaming and shouting and calling IT the most incompetent bunch of morons to ever walk the planet."
The core of the complaint was that some emails had not survived the migration. Curtis's colleague dug into the situation and watched as the exec clicked on the mail folder structure and demanded to know where the "Trash" folder might be found.
Curtis's apprentice showed him the Recycle Bin.
That action saw the exec intone the following:
"I need my Trash back, it is where I keep all my important mails."
"Needless to say, because of the limited time available to my team, the one folder we hadn't migrated was the Trash," Curtis lamented.
Remember how Curtis kept the old disk safe? That decision made it easy to restore the Trash. And also meant the exec's name was trashed as the entire IT department chortled at the "I need my Trash" line.
"After that we made sure that any instructions sent to the executive level were pitched at the right level of intelligence," Curtis concluded.
Have you been involved in an incident that saw you decide to dumb things down? [10]Click here to email On Call and share your story. ®
Get our [11]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/sysadminmonth&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZLEcyeA9UKt1AOsBa9DBygAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/sysadminmonth&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZLEcyeA9UKt1AOsBa9DBygAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/sysadminmonth&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZLEcyeA9UKt1AOsBa9DBygAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/sysadminmonth&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZLEcyeA9UKt1AOsBa9DBygAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_specialfeatures/sysadminmonth&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZLEcyeA9UKt1AOsBa9DBygAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/07/on_call/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/30/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/16/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/26/on_call/
[10] mailto:oncall@theregister.com
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Sounds like a lot of trash talk
Today's story was rubbish...
One can skip the niceties and dump on an exec who's wheelie bin that rubbish.
I need my Trash
It would be funny if I hadn't met at least one person who treated the Trash bin as her personal temporary storage space.
How she never screwed that up is beyond me.
Re: I need my Trash
Using trash as storage, temporary or otherwise gets mentioned here from time to time. It seems a big gap in email clients that there doesn't seem to be anything between Inbox - which in any sensible usage ought to be for incoming mail yet to be read and Trash which anyone ought to realise is for stuff held temporarily before deletion. Deletion from Trash ought to be automatic after a configurable interval to discourage use as storage.
Re: I need my Trash
Personally, I'd like to see a time limit on trash being implemented at an OS level. Admittedly, I am not sure if Windows offers an option at GPO level to do this, but as a support person, I've dealt many times with someone complaining they've run out of disk space, then looked in the Recycle bin to find hundreds of thousands of files/folders in there.. It's not fun to have to wait for Windows to have delete that many files.
Re: I need my Trash
in the olden days we used to have a "logon script" running alongside the GPOs , which would easily accomodate a "check the bin , delete anything older than x days" command.
Oh dear
I just wish I could say that I have never heard of that before, but...
It seems the more self-important a person is the more bizarre their thought processes become and I have had to re-educate a number of apparently intelligent people that Trash is a baaaad place to keep 'things I need to work on'. The best way to fix this is to enable a process to flush the Trash every night until they get the hint
Re: Oh dear
Remind them that their physical bin gets emptied regularly and they only file stuff there when they want to see the back of it.
Re: Oh dear
Its called trash / deleted , I cant really see how it could be any clearer
Yes , you could send memos , saying "Stuff in trash folder will be deleted" , but this is just admitting defeat , like having to put "do not drink" on bleach bottles
Damn sight more common than might be thought...
I have seen exactly this from "clever" people within institutions of advanced cleverness.
As a colleague once observed "you have to wonder how they get home each night" or indeed how they manage get here each day in the first instance.
Boggles the mind they have never right clicked or whatever and seen "empty trash" - bit of clue but I guess wasted on the clueless and those with the curiosity of house brick.
Re: "you have to wonder how they get home each night
A young lady I know well worked for a time with the MOD police, wandering around with an automatic pistol and a rifle, providing security at AWE Aldermaston. Occasionally, for a variety of reasons, the main gate would be unavailable for use. Not very often but it did happen from time to time. Most people simply sighed and used one of the other entrances.
She was, however, amazed at some of the allegedly clever scientists whose reaction was "but how an I going to get home?" And making it necessary to have the solution explained to them. Time after time.
Re: Damn sight more common than might be thought...
Boggles the mind they have never right clicked
Right clicked? what do you think we are boffins?
"I'm not a computer person , thats what you brain boxes are for in the IT dept! "
I've seen this too. I guess when you get important enough, "trash" ceases to be a euphemism for destroy or an alternative word for rubbish... because otherwise I really don't understand the thought process. You wouldn't file your important papers in the wheelie bin, would you?
You wouldn't file your important papers in the wheelie bin
Maybe not, but I've had a load of couriers who consider it to be "my safe location".
Still, I guess that's better than the one who though the deep puddle under the neighbour's over-the-road wheelie was better.
Had to restore an exchange server to recover an execs deleted
Pretty much same issue described in this story. Exec storing critical in deleted folder. Somehow deleted got deleted and went past soft recovery windows. Exchange server needed restoring to get it back.
Recycle Bin is not permanent storage
I've seen more than one senior business person use the Recycle Bin to keep important documents in. Of course, emptying it was the first thing we did when they complained their disk was full. I did learn to ask first, eventually.
It could be worse
I have seen users where every email is in the inbox in one case over 25000 of them - complained it was slow to start.
But going back to my desktop support days (years ago) the users who used the desktop as the storage area always made me wonder what they thought it was for. I admit to using it as a temporary holding area but for long term storage not practical in my view.
Re: It could be worse
An untidy computer desktop is a real bugbear of mine. I hate to see it.
The top of my literal desk, however...
I never understood that but I've had people do the same, use trash as another storage location.
They should try /dev/null -- that one never gets full!
Had a former colleague who stored important emails in "Drafts", for no clearly explained reason. All was fine until we did a migratoin from on-prem Exchange to Google Mail - as in this story, certain folders weren't transferred to save time, especially as the transfer had to be done over Christmas as this was the only time you could guarantee 48 - 72 hours of downtime. Cue this person kicking off that we'd lost his critical information from years of working there.
Well I'm not alone...
It looks like I'm not alone.. on several occasions in the distant past I had the same problem, employees storing important emails in the Deleted Items folder in Exchange, which of course is the sort of thing you purge first when their measly on-prem mailbox quota was exceeded. They had apparently been "told" to do it, but when pressed they couldn't say by whom or why. My guess is that they didn't know how to create their own folders. They didn't like it when I asked if they kept all their important paper files in the physical waste bin either. "Of course not, why would I do that?"
I'm glad I don't work in user support any more..
Re: Well I'm not alone...
They had apparently been "told" to do it, but when pressed they couldn't say by whom or why.
They probably train each other to do that. The email client doesn't provide any options other than Inbox and Trash or, as someone said above, Drafts. Maybe some use Sent - that probably would get restored in migrations so doesn't become part of support stories.
American English at work?
Trash is an unusual word to use in English English. Perhaps the exec would not have been so confused if it had been labelled Waste Paper Basket?
Re: American English at work?
My client (Seamonkey) labels it "Deleted" but that's equally strange. If it's deleted why is it still there?
Re: American English at work?
Google can't seem to make their mind up whether it's called "Trash" or "Bin" depending on whether you're using the Gmail web client or the mobile app.
Deja vu
Similar happened to me with another (now huge) multinational retailer around the turn of the century. To save some disk space we decided to put a retention of 30 days on emails in the Trash folder. Judging by the howls a month later, I reckon at least 10% of staff were using the Trash folder as their primary email archive. The explanation was "it's easy just to click delete to move it out of the Inbox".
Bring back OS/2
It had a shredder. Once you dragged files to it they did not come back out.
In version 2.0 the shredder would shred pretty much anything, even the objects you're not supposed to shred. This got patched.
UX Design is Destiny
To be fair, this is to some degree the fault of the people who wrote the email program. The "move email to the trash" workflow is so central in email programs that it has its own button (delete). This is very useful, especially if you're not quite sure how to do a mass-select or a drag'n'drop. If the delete key instead moved emails to an autocreated "Already Read" folder, I guarantee there would be no issue.
Training?
How many companies have training for the users of their IT systems? There are two aspects - basic OS, mail, etc. and specific IT policies and I've never worked anywhere that does it. I've seen ethics training, inclusivity training, micro-agression training, working at heights, commercial and email/internet security, but never basic IT. Companies seem to assume that everyone understands Windows, Outlook, etc. and that just sending a "don't store stuff on the C: drive" memo is enough to make sure that people understand and comply with company data management procedures. You wouldn't give someone a company car without making sure they were fit to drive so why would you give them a computer without making sure they were able to use it safely and securely?
This is I.T's fault , not the Execs
I.T. are supposed to account for idiocy in the users , especially in the old days when "I'm not a computer person" had some sort of validity.
Migrating user data in a "new OS" situation is akin to "moving house" , you have to check under the mattresses and everywhere else if the user id not present
and then not burn the old house down before confirming with the owner everything is present at new location.
... which the guy in this story did - by keeping old hard drives , a luxury not always afforded due to budget.
And also meant the exec's name was trashed as the entire IT department chortled at the "I need my Trash" line.
Well, we've all bin there...