Important people are not necessarily smart people

[greatblondino.livejournal.com]

(X-posted to personal LJ)

Recently the trustees of my organisation decided they wanted access to our fileshare. They have nothing to do with day-to-day operations, but since they're in charge they got what they wanted. I made them a folder for organisational stuff and told them to save everything into that. First I see a few new folders created, which is fine, I guess they wanted to upload some documents. Then users start complaining that their shortcuts don't work anymore, so I go look and things have been renamed or moved. Everyone here knows where to find what they need so I don't really see the point in moving stuff about, but hey.



After a couple of weeks, it becomes a real problem. Things are all over the place and people are getting pissed off. It looks like the trustees, working from home, are spending their entire days 'tidying up', and nobody in the office dares say anything since, well, you don't really tell a director they're being a moron if you know what's good for you. They stick mostly to non-operational stuff so we let them get on with it. First we get short, cryptic filenames that nobody understands:

\\server\shared\orginf\trst\mtgmnts\mtgdec2006mnts\mntsmswrd.doc

I explain that they're free to make the file names a little more human readable, if they like, but this apparently doesn't make it clear enough that Windows Server 2003 is perfectly happy with things like spaces and capital letters in file names, so we get things like:

\\server\shared\organisationalfiles\trusteesdocuments\meetingminutes\meetingdecember2006minutes\minutesofthemeetingindecember2006microsoftworddocument.doc

So I politely explain that really, you can rename stuff as much as you like. Please, make the file names readable. They go away, and a few days later everything looks much neater, with uppercase letters and spaces in all the right places. Now, still nobody has a clue what's where, so we fire off a polite e-mail asking if they can explain the new layout. We get an angry one back saying that the layout is perfectly clear and is documented in a Word file, to which they provide the link. We try to open it and it fails. (Not that I expected them to list every single file and folder in a Word document, but that's how they do things). I start trying to figure out why it won't open and eventually get it. The path is something similar to this:

\\server\shared\Organisational Documents\Documents Uploaded By The Trustees\Read-Only Documents (DO NOT CHANGE)\Contents of the shared files on the Virtual Private Network (VPN)\List of Organisational Documents uploaded by the Trustees\VPN Document List\New Microsoft Word Document 2.doc

Yes, that's right, the path exceeded IE/Windows Explorer's maximum path length, so nobody could open it. A manager here politely asks permission to make a few changes, spends days clearing up the trustees' mess, and eventually normality is restored. Since then, the trustees haven't connected a single time to the VPN. Not because they're not allowed, but because they're not really that fussed, it was just a boring couple of weeks and they wanted to feel important. But to this day, we still get e-mails from them saying 'Please save this document into [Ridiculously long path]', because at home they still have a copy of the folder list and they assume that everything is arranged just the way they left it.

It's called the Seagull style of management - fly in, shit all over the place and fly out again.

Expect more trustee-related anecdotes in the future.

Comments

[major-error.livejournal.com]

...minor detail, but you forgot about all the noise seagulls make >.>

[laviededavid.livejournal.com]

ya know I can see trustee's and executives doing that "mine mine...mine mine" lmao

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

Windows Server 2003 is perfectly happy with things like spaces and capital letters in file names,

twitch.. twitch..

Sorry, as someone who understands how the underlying filesystem actually works, and the mountains of crap MS kludged on to make this work, and remembers how insanely difficult it is to deal with these from the command line, I'm having nasty flashbacks..

I think I'm going to go get a mug of tea and retreat back to my Unix world - you know, where the file systems are designed from the ground up to support interesting names, and it's not kludged on meta information.

[greatblondino.livejournal.com]

Well ok, as far as end users are concerned it works reasonably well :)

Except, of course, in this case.

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

Sure...

until someone realizes that the command line is faster than guis...

or the filesystem gets hosed and loses all the meta information, and you're pulling the raw files off with names like foo~1234.doc....

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

I don't know about you, but that's MY favorite part! Mmm, msserv~1.bar through msser~56.bar :)

[gholam.livejournal.com]

If your filesystem gets hosed to THAT state, and you don't have backups, you deserve every single last moment spent recovering filenames by hand. Seriously. And for 99% of users (being generous here, there probably should be a few high numbers after decimal point), GUI is faster than command line.

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

If your filesystem gets hosed to THAT state, and you don't have backups, you deserve every single last moment spent recovering filenames by hand

And you have no idea how many thesis papers I've pulled off corrupted windows installs because exactly this thing happened.

Seriously. And for 99% of users (being generous here, there probably should be a few high numbers after decimal point), GUI is faster than command line.

And 99% of users are tools. What is your point? I'm not talking about other people, I'm talking about me, a strong proponent of the idea that "the point of a huge monitor and graphical window manager is to be able to open dozens of xterms and emacs windows simultaneously, and bind opening new ones to hotkeys, so that I don't have to think, I can just do.

[greatblondino.livejournal.com]

I guess maybe it's lucky I have a Word document listing all the files and folders, then :D

[manuka.livejournal.com]

... until they start e-mailing links and Outlook barfs on the spaces. We keep trying to get our users to e-mail links to the document on the share and not the document itself, so that we don't kill our Exchange store (thank $deity for SIS, though!), but when it barfs on the spaces, they get flustered and go back to the old way of chewing up extra storage.

Hopefully, we'll do it right when we roll out Sharepoint.

[blkrabbitofinle.livejournal.com]

At some point, I need to start really reading up on various Outlook errors and areas of weakness. Not because I give two shits about Outlook, but just so I have some ammo next time a user does something to screw up their Lotus Notes and whines, "Well OUTLOOK never has this problem."

Gods above. I'm not claiming that Lotus Notes is some far-shining bastion of software perfection that will send your 10mb Powerpoint attachment to all thirty recipients in a flash, work flawlessly as a complex back-end relational database application and mow your lawns. But neither is fucking Outlook. They're different softwares that do different things in different ways. Both have their own share of errors that are specific to them and so only occur in them. So no, Outlook probably does not ever throw out an error about replication and a database stub when you try to open your inbox, but I'm sure it does something else equally annoying.

Sorry, off on a bit of a rant there, Just hearing someone admit Outlook screws up too got me all excited. :p

[manuka.livejournal.com]

It's not so much that outlook barfs on the spaces, but it automatically creates a hyperlink to the file... but said hyperlink ends at the first space it encounters.

We had a fun incident with Outlook last year. Idiot luser decided to try and send a file with a ONE GIGABYTE attachment. Exchange naturally told Outlook to piss off. Outlook went "OK fine" and dutifully saved it in the drafts folder. At the time, we were running Exchange 2000 and our store was at 15GB. I think you can guess what happened next.

I spent a week (including July 4th holiday) cleaning up that mess, which involved upgrading to Exchange 2003 (totally unbudgeted, the boss was thrilled about that). That was my introduction to Exchange administration (I'd been in that job all of about 2 months at that point). Thankfully things have been a lot better since.

[blkrabbitofinle.livejournal.com]

*Cringes just picturing it* I bet that user was popular.

[manuka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and about 3 months later, inquired with $boss about applying for the open tech support position we had. We all had a good laugh about that one.

[blkrabbitofinle.livejournal.com]

Hahahah! I guess it's always possible they'd learned from their mistakes?

[manuka.livejournal.com]

Not bloody likely in her case.

[greatblondino.livejournal.com]

Pfft, Outlook is a perfectly good mail client. Well, that's until you decide to try to combine it with that other essential Windows networking technology - roaming profiles.

Once you do that, you might as well be trying to run Apple Mail.app on Windows XP.

[blkrabbitofinle.livejournal.com]

Oh ho, really? That's pretty funny. One of my biggest frustrations with users who whine about Lotus is their complete inability to fathom that their home environment where they read a few emails a day and surf some websites is NOT the same environment as a large company with a heavy mail-load, an assload of application databases and a need for high availability, high flexibility, high security, high retention and high accountability.

I'm sure Outlook is a nice enough program for what it does, even if I don't use it myself. But that doesn't change the fact that it is, as you say, a perfectly good mail client - and Lotus is not a mail client, it just has mail built in along with several other vital components like application development. They are different products for different purposes, and so, "Well Outlook does just fine at HOME," is not in any way an intelligent statement or at all useful towards resolving anything.

There's reasons to dislike Notes, certainly. I just wish people would pick on the reasonable ones and maintain a realistic viewpoint about it all. But don't we all about pretty much everything..

[torkell]

He said Windows Server 2003, which implies he's using NTFS. NTFS does natively have nice things like long filenames, compression, encryption, ACLs, and lots of other fancy tricks. NTFS doesn't even generate a short filename unless you ask it for one.

You might be thinking of FAT, which had long filenames grafted on in a horribly hacky way that nonetheless was mostly compatible with DOS (well... compatible as long as you didn't try to do anything even slightly fancy, like run chkdsk).

[mattcaron.livejournal.com]

You're probably right, and I probably am thinking of FAT... It's been a long time since I used anything on that side of the fence. Though, I do remember someone talking about how one didn't have to be a slave to drive letters anymore, because they could mount filesystems anywhere off of the C:\ hierarchy. They looked at me strangely when I welcomed them to 1996 (because that was when I started using Unix, and you could do crap like that back then.. I'm sure it actually predates my encountering it... but I was 16.. it was new for me.).

[greatblondino.livejournal.com]

NTFS all the way, and tbh I've been using Windows since 3.1 and it's been a looong time since I saw a filename like Docume~1.doc.

[snyperwolf.livejournal.com]

I've made ridiculously long path names before ... but it was at least in my personal folders and not on the public network.

Also, I learn. I learned that windows does not like the long path names.

Apparently, trustees can learn too. I was previously unaware of this.

[greatblondino.livejournal.com]

Trustees didn't learn ¬.¬ Trying to teach them made it worse.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, our backup software wasn't terribly keen on those paths either so for a while there wasn't a great deal of disaster recovery available.

[jon787.livejournal.com]

I almost spewed mt dew all over my keyboard at the seagull joke.

See Bike Shed Problem (http://blue.bikeshed.com/) though. The name comes from a 1950s management book.