"You can scroll up, too"



  • One day my boss called me over to his desk. He had WordPerfect installed on his PC, and was trying to use a Google Site I had set up for him. He wanted to post some documents onto the site, but readable by everyone. I had to explain that Microsoft Word users can't read .wpd's. He wanted to know what could be read by everyone. I replied that an RTF was probably the best option, figuring I should keep it simple. I went back to my desk and started working again. Fifteen minutes later, he called me back. 'I can't find RTF!" he said, annoyed since I had reassured him that it would be there. He scrolled down through every time of WordPerfect document ever created, taking about 90 seconds. He finally reached the bottom, and gave me a look that said "So there! There isn't a RTF!". I then told him, "You can scroll up, too." He hadn't realized he could scroll down in the Save As box. He was quite embarrassed, and I was able to work freely for the rest of that day



  • Oh nice. Managers... I mentioned in another thread how my unit had to teach my manager and her two co-workers (non IT people) how to use a recycle bin. They didnt know it could be emptied... and had never emptied theirs in the whole time they'd had their computers.

     Oh and TRWTF is WordPerfect...

     


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Nyquist said:

    They didnt know it could be emptied... and had never emptied theirs in the whole time they'd had their computers.
    Well, considering it's a fixed size, and automatically deletes older items when that is used up to make room for new items, is there really a pressing need for it to be emptied manually?



  • Curious cases of interface blindness.

    But the better part of these can be fixed, thankfully, unlike a basic incapability to comprehend computing systems -- which makes me wonder whether such people also have trouble using other systems, like a car, or a set of paper forms.



  • I overheard the other end of a support call while waiting to meet someone at an office building once. The bit I heard went something like this:

    "Winzip x.x.x"
    "File, Edit, View..."
    "1 file, xxx bytes"
    "File, Edit View..."
    "That's all it says!"
    "1 file, xxx bytes"
    ...etc.

    I couldn't take much of that so I walked into the guy's office and pointed at the file.

    "Oh wait, here it is".

    :/



  • @PJH said:

    Well, considering it's a fixed size, and automatically deletes older items when that is used up to make room for new items, is there really a pressing need for it to be emptied manually?
     

    Yes.

    You see, when the recycling bin gets too full, it spills items. If you take the recycling bin out on the proper day, then the files can be taken to the recycling center and seperated out into 1's and 0's so you can reuse them.



  • @Genius101 said:

     I had to explain that Microsoft Word users can't read .wpd's.

    Are you sure about that?



  • @Nyquist said:

    Oh nice. Managers... I mentioned in another thread how my unit had to teach my manager and her two co-workers (non IT people) how to use a recycle bin. They didnt know it could be emptied... and had never emptied theirs in the whole time they'd had their computers.
     

    While I agree with the sentiment of "oh haha they don't know computers"... uh... why would anybody ever empty the recycle bin? I mean, I know you *can* do it, I just can't imagine a situation where you would want to.

    Emptying the recycle bin defeats the purpose of being able to take things out of it. Plus, it already automatically frees space as needed to avoid disk full errors... so.



  • @blakeyrat said:

     

    While I agree with the sentiment of "oh haha they don't know computers"... uh... why would anybody ever empty the recycle bin? I mean, I know you can do it, I just can't imagine a situation where you would want to.

    Emptying the recycle bin defeats the purpose of being able to take things out of it. Plus, it already automatically frees space as needed to avoid disk full errors... so.

    Does it? I know the disk space at least doesn't show as available again until you actually empty the bin.



  • @shadowman said:

    Does it? I know the disk space at least doesn't show as available again until you actually empty the bin.
     

    Yah. If you need more disk, Windows'll trash old items in the recycle bin until it has enough space to store whatever you're trying to store.

    I'm not sure how this fits in with ShadowCopy, now that you've made me think about it-- maybe the recycle bin and ShadowCopy fight each other for space when the disk is near-full. ShadowCopy space shows as "available" though... hm. Well anyway.

    Either way, the only OS I'm aware of where the trashed files could fill up the disk is super-old Mac versions, like Mac OS 7. And that was a looong time ago.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @shadowman said:

    Does it? I know the disk space at least doesn't show as available again until you actually empty the bin.
     

    Yah. If you need more disk, Windows'll trash old items in the recycle bin until it has enough space to store whatever you're trying to store.

    The performance goes to shit when it gets full of thousands of files and the index frags up.  I've seen it take 25-30 seconds to delete a single file from an explorer window.  Emptied the recycle bin and it was back to as near-instantaneous as it ever was.




  • @DaveK said:

    The performance goes to shit when it gets full of thousands of files and the index frags up.  I've seen it take 25-30 seconds to delete a single file from an explorer window.  Emptied the recycle bin and it was back to as near-instantaneous as it ever was.
     

    This is why we found it funny. Their machines were slow as hell... and they were very happy when we magically made them speed up again.



  • @Nyquist said:

    This is why we found it funny. Their machines were slow as hell... and they were very happy when we magically made them speed up again.
     

    I'm guessing that whatever workflow involves manually deleting enough files that this is an issue is a total WTF itself.



  • I've had to support several people who complained their mailboxes were full. When I went about emptying their Outlook deleted items folder, who was holding half of their allotted quota, they screamed in horror, saying, no, you can't do that, this is my mail archive! WTF?



  • Don't get me started on mail quotas. It's 2010, why does such a thing still exist?

    My company puts a tiny quota on our email, but strangely *no quota at all* on our My Documents share. So I just set Outlook to auto-archive to My Documents, and problem solved.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Don't get me started on mail quotas. It's 2010, why does such a thing still exist?

    Because despite it being 2010, thousands of people would still keep around that stupid movie of the dancing cg baby, and a guy getting hit in the nuts with a golf club, and a bunch of other stuff that they'll never look at again, but which is taking up space, if they didn't have a quota.



  • @dcardani said:

    Because despite it being 2010, thousands of people would still keep around that stupid movie of the dancing cg baby, and a guy getting hit in the nuts with a golf club, and a bunch of other stuff that they'll never look at again, but which is taking up space, if they didn't have a quota.
     

    So? Who cares?

    The cost of adding storage to the email server is significantly less than the cost of the man-hours taken to clean-up inboxes.



  • @Nyquist said:

     Oh and TRWTF is WordPerfect...

     

     

     

    I disagree.  You think it's a WTF because you never learned to use it.  The "Reveal Codes" feature alone makes it better than Word.  The only reason I use Word at all is  because it's more widespread. 



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @dcardani said:

    Because despite it being 2010, thousands of people would still keep around that stupid movie of the dancing cg baby, and a guy getting hit in the nuts with a golf club, and a bunch of other stuff that they'll never look at again, but which is taking up space, if they didn't have a quota.
     

    So? Who cares?

    The cost of adding storage to the email server is significantly less than the cost of the man-hours taken to clean-up inboxes.

     

    ... except when said email server is something like Exchange 2000 standard with a 16 GB database limit.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @dcardani said:

    Because despite it being 2010, thousands of people would still keep around that stupid movie of the dancing cg baby, and a guy getting hit in the nuts with a golf club, and a bunch of other stuff that they'll never look at again, but which is taking up space, if they didn't have a quota.
     

    So? Who cares?

    The cost of adding storage to the email server is significantly less than the cost of the man-hours taken to clean-up inboxes.

    The (low) five-figure cost of adding a new rack of drives to a NetApp can convince management that a few man-hours tidying up would be well spent!



  •  @DaveK said:

    The (low) five-figure cost of adding a new rack of drives to a NetApp can convince management that a few man-hours tidying up would be well spent!

    Just use the word "cloud" a few times.

    Ok, storage costs aside, it should still go into the "don't fucking annoy the hell out of your employees with worthless shit" file.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    So I just set Outlook to auto-archive to My Documents, and problem solved.
     

    Except you've now got a PST file on a network share, so you have a bunch of new problems...



  • @upsidedowncreature said:

    Except you've now got a PST file on a network share, so you have a bunch of new problems...
     

    Like what? (Not making fun, genuinely curious. I haven't come across any problems yet.)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @upsidedowncreature said:

    Except you've now got a PST file on a network share, so you have a bunch of new problems...
     

    Like what? (Not making fun, genuinely curious. I haven't come across any problems yet.)

    There are file locking and performance problems - this puts it better than I can:

    As well as the general performance problems, we have found the PST files are very susceptible to corruption.  This is usually fixable using the scanpst tool which you should find in the Outlook directory.  Hey, I wonder why they included that?  Finally if you've got several outlook sessions open (in our case I often have Outlook open on the desktop and in a Citrix desktop session), the fact that the file is locked will cause a "server not available" in one or other of the sessions.  OK if you know what's going on but it spooks the users. 

     Aaand it's not a supported configuration, although we only found this out after doing it - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297019




  •  It's just my archive one, I hardly ever touch it... search it maybe once a month, max.

    Thanks for the info, though.



  • @upsidedowncreature said:

    @http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/01/21/network-stored-pst-files-don-t-do-it.aspx said:


    This is usually fixable using the scanpst tool which you should find in the Outlook directory.  Hey, I wonder why they included that? 


    See also VSS' "Analyze/Fix database" tool.  That's also something which should never exist in the first place.

     



  • @upsidedowncreature said:

    Except you've now got a PST file on a network share, so you have a bunch of new problems...
    Like having to push/pull a near gigabyte file on every change/read. Fun fact: PSTs have a hard-coded limit of 2GB, over a network share you start to get really annoying issues around the 1.7GB mark.



  • @DaveK said:

    See also VSS' "Analyze/Fix database" tool.  That's also something which should never exist in the first place.

    This.  Oh lordy yes.



  • @upsidedowncreature said:

    @DaveK said:

    See also VSS' "Analyze/Fix database" tool.  That's also something which should never exist in the first place.

    This.  Oh lordy yes.

    I think VSS itself should never have existed n the first place, but meh.



  •  This sounds suspiciously familiar. A few months ago, one of our managers emailed me to say that one of my automated reports was incomplete.  I looked over the file that was mailed out, but everything was there.  I emailed him telling him to "scroll up".  a few minutes later, he responded with an apology.  These are intelligent people, but everyone has no-brainer-days.

     (On a side note, imagine trying to be professional and hold your temper and/or laughter while telling someone to "scroll up")



  • @PJH said:

    Well, considering it's a fixed size, and automatically deletes older items when that is used up to make room for new items, is there really a pressing need for it to be emptied manually?
     

    Yes... yes, there is. Though hopefully not at work...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @PSWorx said:

    @PJH said:
    Well, considering it's a fixed size, and automatically deletes older items when that is used up to make room for new items, is there really a pressing need for it to be emptied manually?
    Yes... yes, there is. Though hopefully not at work...
    Sounds like you'd be better served with True-crypt than relying on the vagaries of the recycle bin and your memory



  • @SuperAnalyst said:

     This sounds suspiciously familiar. A few months ago, one of our managers emailed me to say that one of my automated reports was incomplete.  I looked over the file that was mailed out, but everything was there.  I emailed him telling him to "scroll up".  a few minutes later, he responded with an apology.  These are intelligent people, but everyone has no-brainer-days.

     (On a side note, imagine trying to be professional and hold your temper and/or laughter while telling someone to "scroll up")

    You've obviously never worked support.  After the first few thousand times or so you just go numb to it all. 




  • @tharpa said:

    @Nyquist said:

     Oh and TRWTF is WordPerfect...

     

     

     

    I disagree.  You think it's a WTF because you never learned to use it.  The "Reveal Codes" feature alone makes it better than Word.  The only reason I use Word at all is  because it's more widespread. 

    Agreed. It also has a much more sane document model (and all versions are compatible from 6.0 onward). And of course has been able to save/export to PDF since version 7 (1996) if you happen to want a document that's usually readable for everyone.

    I nowadays am usually stuck with OpenOffice on either Linux or Mac. (I do have MS Office for Mac too) Unfortunately the creators of Oo.org were more interested in mimicing Word...

     What WP lacks is a good office suite, especially Quatro Pro is nothing in comparison to Excel. I think Excel and Exchange/Outlook are the reason MS is so dominant in this area, not Word.

     In handling Images, Tables of Content, Equations, multipart/large documents, printer independent layout, and much more, WP is still a superiour product to Word, it just lacks an Office Suite and related software eco system that can match the rest of MS' offerings.



  • @RogerWilco said:

    @tharpa said:

    @Nyquist said:

     Oh and TRWTF is WordPerfect...


     

     

    I disagree.  You think it's a WTF because you never learned to use it.  The "Reveal Codes" feature alone makes it better than Word.  The only reason I use Word at all is  because it's more widespread. 

    Agreed. It also has a much more sane document model (and all versions are compatible from 6.0 onward). And of course has been able to save/export to PDF since version 7 (1996) if you happen to want a document that's usually readable for everyone.

    I nowadays am usually stuck with OpenOffice on either Linux or Mac. (I do have MS Office for Mac too) Unfortunately the creators of Oo.org were more interested in mimicing Word...

     What WP lacks is a good office suite, especially Quatro Pro is nothing in comparison to Excel. I think Excel and Exchange/Outlook are the reason MS is so dominant in this area, not Word.

     In handling Images, Tables of Content, Equations, multipart/large documents, printer independent layout, and much more, WP is still a superiour product to Word, it just lacks an Office Suite and related software eco system that can match the rest of MS' offerings.

    QFT



  • @Genius101 said:

    He wanted to post some documents onto the site, but readable by everyone. I had to explain that Microsoft Word users can't read .wpd's. He wanted to know what could be read by everyone. I replied that an RTF was probably the best option...
    Why not just post the content?  Why mess with a .doc or .rtf file?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @belgariontheking said:

    @Genius101 said:

    He wanted to post some documents onto the site, but readable by everyone. I had to explain that Microsoft Word users can't read .wpd's. He wanted to know what could be read by everyone. I replied that an RTF was probably the best option...
    Why not just post the content?  Why mess with a .doc or .rtf file?

    Pretty colo(u)rs! Cute smileys with shocking hair or committing suicide!! Goecities <to be constructed> img in the relevant sections!!!



    What's not to like? It works in emails doesn't it?


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