I don't know why, but I felt like posting this. It's a letter I sent around to all our staff. I had a lot of fun writing it... This has been needed for such a long time, it's like acheiving something great.
From: Justin Warner
Sent: Tuesday, 19 July 2005 1:56 PM
To: All Staff
Subject: [Important IT Information] File storage quotas
Importance: High
Hello all,
On Friday evening this week, we will be imposing a 600Mb quota on users' data. What this means, is that all the data stored on your desktop and in your My Documents, must be less then 600Mb. If it's above this figure, the computer will tell you that "The disk is full" when you try to save.
Now, for the vast majority of you this won't be a problem, but for about 32 of you it will necessitate some serious culling of your current stored data.
This is being done to enable us to supply disk space to you all in a fair and equitable way. And you can't argue with equity, can you? :P
Now, before you all start phoning me or stopping by the office to ask what to do with the mountains of data you've accumulated, let me get you started in step-by-step form:
- Open your My Documents folder
- Find a document that you haven't opened in the last month (or better yet, a whole folder of documents!)
- Click on that document, once.
- Cry a quiet tear, and say goodbye.
- Hit the delete key, and when asked if you're sure, assertively click "Yes".
- Feel empowered.
- Repeat steps 1-6 as many times as possible
- When finished, right-click on the Recycle Bin and choose "Empty Recycle Bin".
- Finally, assert yourself with a triumphant click on the "Yes" button.
See, it's not hard! And it gives you an incredible sense of freedom and empowerment! Almost as good as a Tony Robbins seminar, and less expensive!!
Please remember, seeing as IT people tend to shun social contact, my preferred method of contact in regards to this is mental telepathy, but failing that you could send me an email I guess.
Cheers,
Justin Warner
3 comments:
Erm... Jus, I wouldn't have sent an email like that, and I'm hardly known for my dry, boring emails. I always lace my missives to our Staff with some degree of humour, but this was just asking for trouble. The characteristics of a "good" email for announcing a policy like this would have included:
• A rationale, contrasting the need for the quota against the overall available resources.
• An "out" for people who might legitimately need a larger limit (via supplication to yourself, of course)
• A longer lead time until the deadline.
• Less obvious aversion to inquiry and communication to yourself.
Padawan, you forget the cardinal rule of being a BOFH , which is leveraging your control over a desired resource (storage, new toys, etc) to your advantage. Thus, instead of announcing "we have insufficient storage" and doing something that can only make you unpopular, instead take the view that "the resources allocated to my IT department to facilitate staff to store all their important, critical, necessary data are insufficient, and thus we need a new server!"
We had this problem. All our staff back up their local home folders from their laptops to the server. I'm looking at the backup volume now. A fifth of my users are above 2Gb, the biggest is 6Gb, and fully half are above your suggested quota of 600Mb. What did I do? I bought a Dual G5 processor Xserve, 1.2 terabyte RAID 5 array. My precious...
Instead of being "Mr Smarty Pants", you could get better stuff™ and be a hero for the poor oppressed plebs who are not being properly serviced by the IT department (which, in turn, is not your problem,, get it?
Just a suggestion...
The characteristics of a "good" comment on my last post would have excluded (amongst other things):
1.) questioning of my handling of a situation that only I would know the details of.
2.) the suggestion that simply buying new hardware to accomodate staff's constantly increasing storage wants is a good idea.
3.) a reference to me as "Mr. Smarty Pants"
See, I think it's poor stewardship of my organisation's resources to just allow people to develop bad computing habits (like keeping years of irrelevant data) and keep supporting that by expanding our data storage capasity at substantial cost. Limits are important and necissary to keep systems functioning and fair.
Lastly, I'm a bit disapointed that your comment so obviously implies: "What you've done is bad because it's not how I would do it."
Excuse my persicution complex for a moment, but I seem to constantly get labeled as the IT guy who's still in training, and should be adopting everyone else's point-of-view. Maybe, just maybe, I'm right here. Maybe the staff at my work just need to pull their heads in and backup/delete a stack of their old data. Maybe, even if I don't always know best, I would about this - as it's my job, and I do a damn fine job of it too.
I get enough of this crap from my users who'd rather get their own way then conform to something fair, without having crap slung at me on here as well. I posted this letter for amusement/novelty value only. Maybe I should have just left the comments turned off...
A "good" reply to my comment to your post would have had good spelling and more sense, but who's counting?
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