STATIC DISCLAIMER: All the stuff in here is purely my opinions, and they tend to change depending on what mood I'm in. If you're going to get bitter if I say something about you that you don't like, then maybe don't read. I avoid using names as much as possible, and would request that people who know me do the same in their comments. Basically, I often vent my frustrations on here, so if you happen to be someone who frustrates me, expect to read a description of someone very much like you in here!

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Indispencable (is probably spelt wrong)

Let's imagine for a second that there's an IT department at a company somewhere... or actually, make it a school. Yeah, an IT department at a school. And let's imagine that I work there, and I work with a guy who's my boss, and another guy kinda equal with me. That sounds good...
So anyway, in this imaginary workplace I have to be away for a couple of weeks. When I return, there are some serious problems with the imaginary servers. One of the major problems is that in this imaginary workplace's imaginary Exchange organisation, there's a completely metaphorical mailbox store who's users can no longer send or recieve emails. This mailbox store holds the mailboxes for, oh I don't know, 1600 odd imaginary users who have assignments due that have to be submitted through email. Because these users are students, we'll pretend all their mail gets archived into a public folder in case there are issues that arise that need to be investigated.
While I was absent from this fictitious workplace, my imaginary colleague "accidently" deleted this public folder. See, he has admin rights, same as me and so can do such a thing. To try and fix the problem, he creates a new public folder and gives it a simular name. That'll fix it, right? GAHHH!!! Anyway, as a result all mail sent and recieved to users in that mailbox store has an unresolvable recipient, and so gets delayed and eventually fails to be delivered.
The most annoying thing about this pretend scenario is that this is the third time it's happened, and I've shown him what needs to be done to fix it. I've explained that even if you name the folder exactly the same name it's not enough to fix the problem, as each folder you create is identified uniquely. And I've shown this imaginary colleague of mine the steps he had to take to fix the problem. And yet he's broken it again, not told anyone, and then I've been misinformed by my boss (he didn't know either) that he believes the problem lies with our email content filter. After half a day trying to fix a metaphorical problem that wasn't even there, I realise what's happened, have a metaphorical fit, and then fix it and get back to work.

The worst part is, nothing will change, and I'll probably be imagining this all over again in a months time....

2 comments:

Monkeytree said...

Sounds like a frustrating scenario - good thing it was only imaginary, otherwise I can just imagine what would be going through your mind ... ;-)

m said...

Hard to find good help these days...