Oldies vs ComputersAs someone who is "good with computers" I get a lot of calls from people who've got problems. Some of them even have problems with their computers.
Back many years ago working for a telecoms company, I was called to a senior secretary who "had put a disk into the drive and couldn't get it out". She had one of the first Mac II machines with two drive slots. But only one drive.
Opening up the case revealed stacks of floppy disks that she'd been posting through the hole in the case for weeks. She'd only decided there was a problem when her boss wanted one of them back...
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chthonic, Fri 22 Sep 2006, 13:58)
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A few weeks backI was charged with trying to rationalise the mess which was the Internet Orders customer support email computer.
Given that they insist on keeping all mails available for over a year (and around 80,000 are sent/received across the course of a year), this had to be made pretty straightforward, but needed regular archiving as 99% of the work would be carried out on mail received from the past month or so.
Sadly, this meant liaising with the manageress of the Customer support dept to try and find a straightforward solution to her woes.
I tried to explain the concept of all email which had been sent or received more than 3 months ago automatically being moved into another folder entitled "All Mail you have sent and received more than 3 months ago is stored in here".
After around 20 minute of explaining, re-explaining, and simple hand-holding exercises designed to get her to understand, she still didn't seem to be able to work out which folder new mail would be stored in, and which folder mail older than 3 months would be in, accused me of making it all far too complicated with veiled threats of complaining to the directors, and demanded it be made simpler.
I relented, put all 80,000 mails in one folder, retired to the happy space under my desk, and wept, as I gently rocked backward and forward.
(, Sun 24 Sep 2006, 16:10, Reply)
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