I work for a large architecture firm. As anyone who works in the field knows, it's easy to get yourself in trouble if you don't keep a paper trail of everything you do. So for the last 2 years I've been filing all my important incoming and outgoing emails in a "cabinet" on our office email network. I've accumulated several thousand emails, all sorted into their appropriate folders and subfolders, and I reference them on a daily basis for one thing or another. To give you an idea of what's in there, it includes:
--Projects I'm currently working on / tasks to complete
--Old projects that I use for reference
--Office information, in case I need to look up where Joe Smith sits or what codes to bill on my timesheet
Suffice it to say that I have a lot of extremely important information in there. So you can imagine how I almost keeled over in my chair when on Friday I opened up a folder and ALL my emails were GONE. For the next five minutes I panicked, opening folder after folder as though the emails might sense my distress and reappear. Finally I came across my Trash folder, which to my shock (and great relief) contained 3300 emails...everything that was missing. Then I looked at the deleted date, and that's when my relief turned to anger. They were deleted at 2 am on 7/1, the Saturday before, when I was not even remotely near the office. It seems that our brilliant IT department had decided to run some kind of cleanup over the weekend, with no prior warning, that deleted every email over a month old. WTF?? So I angrily spent over an hour re-sorting my emails back into their folders. I managed to clean some old junk out along the way and ended up putting about 1800 emails back into the cabinet.
It didn't end there. First thing Monday morning, guess what...there were 1800 emails back in the Trash. Apparently whatever the IT department did is deleting the emails on a daily basis. I spent about 30 minutes dumping them back into the correct folders and then sent a complaint to the IT Helpline. This is sort of an email forum where you can ask a question and the IT people (supposedly) will get back to you. Well, by 4:45 today I hadn't heard a peep from them so I marched myself over to their office, where the last IT guy was just heading out for the day. I asked him about the lack of response and he brushed me off with an "Oh yeah, that's on my list to come talk to you tomorrow. " Nice. So once again I spent 30 minutes sorting my email, knowing full well that they'll be back in the Trash tomorrow, because I'm terrified of what will happen if I leave them there overnight. I really don't have time for this crap. Thanks for nothing, IT jerks.
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7 comments:
c'mon andrea, let it allllll out.
but having your e-mail sytematically cleaned is a real dick thing to do. it just seems stupid to mess with something like e-mail. sure, lots of people aren't responsible and need the clean-ups, but yikes! sounds like the ITs need their heads examined! they shouldn't have sone something that stupid, and there's no way you're the only one unhappy with this, i bet.
and if you are, we all have your back.
YAY for posting!
And that really is lame. How is it their business to delete things in your cabinet anyway? If they want to clean out your trash or bulk mail, fine, but otherwise they need to keep their paws off.
I say give them one fair warning then start keying their cars.
Here's an update...
The day after I posted this, I waited for "We'll talk tomorrow" guy to come help me, but obviously he didn't give a crap about my problem and never showed up (hey guys, my desk is 30 feet from your office, how hard is it??) So I went in there to complain again.
Me: Do you have a minute to help me with the email problem we talked about yesterday?
IT: (blank stare) What problem?
Me: All my emails are disappearing--
IT: Oh, right. Well our office policy has always been that emails get deleted after 30 days, it's just been kind of lax until now.
Me: Umm yeah, considering I have 2 years worth of emails stored in there... So where should I keep my important emails that need to be saved?
IT: (now speaking like I'm a toddler) They need to go in your shared project folders. Do you know what those are?
[side note: none of my old projects HAVE shared project folders, and I don't have the authority to create those! I let that one go.]
Me: And what about emails that aren't specific to a project, like office-related stuff?
IT: We're looking into that. (Read: It'll never happen.) Right now we recommend that you print those, or save them as a PDF to your personal drive.
[side note: Our personal drives hold 50 MB, which means you can save about 3 documents before your programs won't run. Also, our office policy is to minimize printing whenever possible. So much for saving those trees.]
Me: Great.
Over the last week I've spent several hours of company time just managing my email. If I have to go print out 1800 emails, or forward them to my Gmail account (this may be the best solution), just imagine how long that will take. And I'm not the only one who complained. Add us all up and that's a lot of time wasted. Suck it up IT, and buy us another server instead of screwing everybody over.
Don't worry, Seth from "The Business Place" will take care of it. :)
I like Corey's suggestion...I'll send the warning in email form since apparently they don't read those...wouldn't that be poetic justice.
seth WILL get it done. and then spit on you for your birthday, you'll see.
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