Chromebooks don't work very well without internet

anonymous234

http://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/2g37hj/tifu_by_deleting_the_entire_mailing_list_acquired/

All of our nice computers were being used as demo machines, and we were stuck with a Chromebook to collect the email sign-ups. Chromebooks don't work very well without internet, but I had managed to load up a Google Doc spreadsheet in "offline mode" to collect all of the emails. Or so I thought.

Over the course of four days, we collected hundreds of email sign-ups in the spreadsheet. Everything seemed just fine. However, when we got back to the office, the Chromebook reconnected with the internet, synced, and the entire spreadsheet was erased in an instant. Turns out that it wasn't properly set up in offline mode, so none of our edits to it were saved.

The entire product of our trip to the trade show, which required weeks of preparation and over $6500 in costs, was gone.

accalia

Filed under: Well, Duh..., Google didn't think of that did they?, umm..... whoops?

blakeyrat

Wow, somehow Google hypnotized that guy into thinking he fucked up, when the fuck-up was in Google's broken-ass product.

accalia

@blakeyrat said:

Look at these people. Glassy-eyed automatons going about theyr daily lives, never stopping to look around and think! I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep.

... actually... he makes a good point...

OK, wow. i'mma need to sit down and think about this for a while.

Garry_Wong

TRWTF is paying $6500 for a few hundred lousy emails.

Keith

@Garry_Wong said:

TRWTF is paying $6500 for a few hundred lousy emails.

Especially when you can get thousands for free by posting a sob story on reddit.

DrPepper

TRWTF is using a product specifically designed for on-line connectivity (chromebook, google docs) when a trip to best buy could have netted you a $200.00 laptop which would have worked just fine. (It comes with notepad, if nothing else)

TRWTF is using a spreadsheet that you couldn't save to disk "until you got back to the office".

TRWTF is losing probably $10,000 in real expenses, and who knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales leads and revenue, because you couldn't run home and grab your personal laptop.

If you're still employed tomorrow, I'd be really surprised.

cartman82

@DrPepper said:

If you're still employed tomorrow, I'd be really surprised.

Actually, he'll probably get a raise.

Edit 6: HOLY SHIT! I just checked our site stats; apparently THOUSANDS of you clicked that link above, and our list grew by more today than it otherwise has grown in the last MONTH! We added more new emails than we lost at the exhibition. Honestly, I have no words; you guys fucking rock.

Edit 7: WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK!!?!?! I get in this morning and our mailing list has TRIPLED. You guys have added 2x more names than the rest of our company's entire marketing efforts to date. What is this shit?

Edit 8: So apparently the r/bestof crosspost is now one of the top links on r/all; here's what you guys did to our mailing list: http://imgur.com/EDRQhjx

http://imgur.com/EDRQhjx

ben_lubar

@DrPepper said:

TRWTF is using a product specifically designed for on-line connectivity (chromebook, google docs) when a trip to best buy could have netted you a $200.00 laptop which would have worked just fine. (It comes with notepad, if nothing else)

TRWTF is that they could have bought a $1 notebook and used that instead of the spreadsheet.

mott555

You gotta use that tech budget though otherwise it'll be gone next year!

Fine, fine, we'll just purchase 10,000 spiral notebooks...

prozacchiwawa

Really, TRWTF is a chromebook without a real linux chroot. With it, a chromebook is a fine, if underpowered laptop.

ben_lubar

Hey, all I need when I'm away from my gaming PC is a browser. Anything more than that would be overkill.

TGV

@cartman82 said:

here's what you guys did to our mailing list: http://imgur.com/EDRQhjx

Reddit subscribes to random mailing list and owners are happy with it? How many things are wrong with this? Or is it ok because it's gaming?

The Google Docs Offline team also contacted us

Now there's TRWTF.

dkf

@DrPepper said:

TRWTF is using a product specifically designed for on-line connectivity (chromebook, google docs) when a trip to best buy could have netted you a $200.00 laptop which would have worked just fine. (It comes with notepad, if nothing else)

TRWTF is not getting 1 month of internet dongle (maybe with $10 of credit) so that the chromebook could stay connected.

billhead

@dkf said:

TRWTF is not getting 1 month of internet dongle (maybe with $10 of credit) so that the chromebook could stay connected.

Doesn't look like an option,

A few important things about booths at conventions/trade shows:

There is seldom and cell phone reception because there are tens of thousands of people walking around.

The wifi is unusably awful.

Wired internet costs $700/day, or $2800 for the 4-day convention.

dkf

@billhead said:

- There is seldom and cell phone reception because there are tens of thousands of people walking around.

So instead everything was risked and lost? Congratulations. Played well, and precisely but utterly lost.

Shoreline

I've had similar behaviour on my phone using the google drive app. A couple of my docs were basically scrambled mysteriously. I only noticed when reading them through and a sentence cut off in the middle of a word, and the next sentence made no sense in context.

The app tells you it can store docs offline. If it's not going to sync them properly, it shouldn't have the feature.

I dont use the app anymore because of this, as I write a lot of docs while on the train with no reception.

dkf

@Shoreline said:

I dont use the app anymore because of this, as I write a lot of docs while on the train with no reception.

The one way I know of that really works is to keep the documents in something like git (but maybe without the filesystem infelicities) and then have the synch apply the changes upstream. That can definitely handle not losing stuff, even in complex scenarios. Getting the auto-merge right would be the trickiest step, but could as a last resort be done manually…

chubertdev

Look at what we're doing to edit a freakin' document.

dkf

If you want to do it the easy way, just pop open a text editor. Every OS has something to do that task, and it is usually quite reasonable enough for editing a basic contact list. Converting it into something pretty for redistribution can be done later; the value is in the contact itself, not the font it is presented in.

Filed under: Gloves

ben_lubar

I use Google Keep quite a lot in the car while I'm going to class. <No, I'm not driving.> I've never had it lose or corrupt any of my notes. I wonder why Google can't make Docs work if it's pretty much the same thing. Or at least show an error message and have the user manually merge the document if there's a conflict instead of just discarding random parts of the document.