"You should have used our webmail."



  • Recently, I was critically injured off-hours during crunch time here and, after being examined, was admitted to the hospital for observation.  Because it was crunch time, I felt I should warn my job that I would be out the next day, but because I didn't have my phone or computer at the time, the only way for me to contact them was via email from the admitting nurse's
    workstation.  

    I described the situation as best I could, left a room number to try calling, sent the email and went on about the business of trying not to asphyxiate over the next day or two.

    When I got back to work the following monday, my supervisor asked here I had been the previous Friday.  After me asking some questions of my own, it was revealed that my initial email had been blocked as spam (coming from a yahoo address as it does) and only the department head knew I had been hospitalized, but didn't tell anyone else.  Said supervisor then proceeded to lay into me for not duly warning the team in advance about my absense and not using the web frontend to our Exchange server, since that wouldn't have been blocked.  Apparently, a -good- employee would remember a URL we use maybe twice a year, even when potentially fatally injured and laying in a hospital.

    To me, there are not one, but four WTFs here:

    1. They ask for everyone's personal email address; in fact, they have mine posted on the intranet here, so they know employees' personal addresses, but they apparently don't whitelist them.
    2. How far in advance should one notify the company when one is expecting to receive an unexpected injury off-hours?
    3. Why didn't the department head tell everyone else what was going on?  If a person in my employ were wounded off-hours, I would definitely let the team know as soon as I found out.
    4. You should NEVER lay into the guy that just came out of the hospital.

    Bonus WTF: should I really be accessing our private stuff from another company's workstations? The hospital is not a competitor of ours, but just the same, this seems like a breach of protocol somehow.

     

    This is one of the many reasons I hate it here.



  • Why's there Kintaro Oe on your avatar? Do you identify with him?



  •  I've found that whenever I send an e-mail to my team's mailing list from my personal account using my iPhone, it gets marked as spam, but when I send it using google mail's web interface it does not. I should probably try to figure out why, but I can't be bothered.



  • @untalented_newbie said:

    Why didn't the department head tell everyone else what was going on?  If a person in my employ were wounded off-hours, I would definitely let the team know as soon as I found out.
     

    Dunno whether HIPAA applies outside of a health care institution, but at the hospital where I work managers will only say that an employee is unavailable unless explicit permission is given. So if I'm out sick with a cold, the flu, etc., I tell my manager what's going on and explicitly state that it's okay to share it with whomever. (It's a freaking cold FFS!)

     

     

    mod: fixed quote. You may quote selectively by selecting some text from the original post in the grey block and clicking "Quote". -dh



  • WTFs

    • having a yahoo address as your personal e-mail
    • forgetting that hospitals might also have a phone
    • laying in bed being lazy without trying to reach your work to verify that they got your mail
    • taking off-time while it's crunch time
    • not remembering the url to the web frontend of exchange
    • letting yourself be critically injured

    Well at least you got hurt on your own time. That counts for something I guess.



  • @stratos said:

    WTFs

    • having a yahoo address as your personal e-mail
    • forgetting that hospitals might also have a phone
    • laying in bed being lazy without trying to reach your work to verify that they got your mail
    • taking off-time while it's crunch time
    • not remembering the url to the web frontend of exchange
    • letting yourself be critically injured


    Well at least you got hurt on your own time. That counts for something I guess.

    TRWTF is that he was playing hockey.  What, were there no open spots on the manicure team?



  •  @nonpartisan said:

    "3. Why didn't the department head tell everyone else what was going on?  If a person in my employ were wounded off-hours, I would definitely let the team know as soon as I found out."

    Dunno whether HIPAA applies outside of a health care institution, but at the hospital where I work managers will only say that an employee is unavailable unless explicit permission is given. So if I'm out sick with a cold, the flu, etc., I tell my manager what's going on and explicitly state that it's okay to share it with whomever. (It's a freaking cold FFS!)

    I hadn't thought of the HIPAA angle, but in the body of the original email, it does explicitly say to tell everyone I am in the hospital and they may call room number blah, so there's that.

     As far as emailing instead of leaving a voicemail, the number lives on my cell phone, so I don't have it memorized, and even if I could have called, talking is a bit tricky with a fractured larynx.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    TRWTF is that he was playing hockey.  What, were there no open spots on the manicure team?
    Hey, you're not being fair.  Hockey features Canada's finest athletes!  And Russia's soberest athletes!  And the northern US's whitest athletes!



  • @Heron said:

    but when I send it using google mail's web interface it does not. I should probably try to figure out why, but I can't be bothered.
    Google mail passes SPF, DomainKeys, DKIM & Sender-ID checks. That's probably why.



  • @Mole said:

    Google mail passes SPF, DomainKeys, DKIM & Sender-ID checks. That's probably why.

    Doesn't sending from the iPhone use the same SMTP servers? If not, that's kind of dumb...



  • Since we found out that Livemail/Hotmail *AND* Yahoo Mail flags plaintext emails as spam (and sometimes rejects them on the SMTP level), but lets the very same content through when sent as HTML mail wrapped in

    <html><head>...</head><body><pre>formerly plaintext content here</pre></body></html>
    , I just gave up on looking for any logic in email processing.

    Anyway, there's a chance your iPhone email client generates some different formatting, or adds a header, or forgets to lubricate enough to push the email through.



  • @Heron said:

    @Mole said:
    Google mail passes SPF, DomainKeys, DKIM & Sender-ID checks. That's probably why.

    Doesn't sending from the iPhone use the same SMTP servers? If not, that's kind of dumb...

    Yes, but the headers are different in each case. In the webmail case, you are sending direct from google, and via smtp, you are sending via your own IP. Ie:

    Received: from [192.168.0.70] ([my.real.ip]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id [some.id]

    Some mail servers will lookup 'my.real.ip', find out its in a DUN or DIP range, and reject or mark the message as spam based on that. 

     



  • @Mole said:

    Some mail servers will lookup 'my.real.ip', find out its in a DUN or DIP range, and reject or mark the message as spam based on that.

    That's kinda funny, isn't it? Discouraging people from uising proper, real, e-mail clients and forcing them to use webmail... >.<



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    Anyway, there's a chance your iPhone email client generates some different formatting, or adds a header, or forgets to lubricate enough to push the email through.

    Or they explicitly blacklist the phrase "Sent from my iPhone". I still fail to see why that thing insists on appending spam to legitimate messages.



  • It's just the default signature. You can change it to whatever you want, or disable it entirely.



  • @nonpartisan said:

    @untalented_newbie said:

    Why didn't the department head tell everyone else what was going on?  If a person in my employ were wounded off-hours, I would definitely let the team know as soon as I found out.
     

    Dunno whether HIPAA applies outside of a health care institution, but at the hospital where I work managers will only say that an employee is unavailable unless explicit permission is given. So if I'm out sick with a cold, the flu, etc., I tell my manager what's going on and explicitly state that it's okay to share it with whomever. (It's a freaking cold FFS!)

     

    I always make it a point to specify way too much information about the reason for my absence.  Phrases like "uncontrolled rectal bleeding" tend to discourage further questions.


  • @mod said:


    mod: fixed quote. You may quote selectively by selecting some text from the original post in the grey block and clicking "Quote". -dh

     

     

     

    Sorry, I was working from my BlackBerry and having fits with it.



  • @nonpartisan said:

    @untalented_newbie said:

    Why didn't the department head tell everyone else what was going on?  If a person in my employ were wounded off-hours, I would definitely let the team know as soon as I found out.
     

    Dunno whether HIPAA applies outside of a health care institution, but at the hospital where I work managers will only say that an employee is unavailable unless explicit permission is given. So if I'm out sick with a cold, the flu, etc., I tell my manager what's going on and explicitly state that it's okay to share it with whomever. (It's a freaking cold FFS!)

     

     

    Well, there's real HIPAA which applies to a fairly limited set of institutions and information, then there's In-Practice-HIPAA, which due to our fear of getting ass-fucked by lawyers has every single entity in the known universe unwilling to make any comment that could be even remotely construed as "medical". "You idiot! Don't tell anyone Joe got a haircut, that's a HIPAA vioation!!"

     



  • @da Doctah said:

    Phrases like "uncontrolled rectal bleeding" tend to discourage further questions.

    Really?  Because it would just raise several questions with me.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @da Doctah said:

    Phrases like "uncontrolled rectal bleeding" tend to discourage further questions.

    Really?  Because it would just raise several questions with me.

     

     

    Horse?  I thought he was on goats now.



  • @Mole said:

    Yes, but the headers are different in each case. In the webmail case, you are sending direct from google, and via smtp, you are sending via your own IP. Ie:

    I remember the header used to be something like

    Received: from [my.real.ip] ([my.real.ip]) by something with HTTP

    when using those webmail services, gmail seems to have removed the "from ip" part of the header. There's still the "X-Originating-IP" header from hotmail.

    @Mole said:

    Some mail servers will lookup 'my.real.ip', find out its in a DUN or DIP range, and reject or mark the message as spam based on that. 

    Those servers are stupid. You can't trust any of the received headers except the last (top) one. Spam measures that trust untrustable headers are not useful and cause more problems than they fix.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @da Doctah said:

    Phrases like "uncontrolled rectal bleeding" tend to discourage further questions.

    Really?  Because it would just raise several questions with me.

     

    Raising such questions is normal.  But if you ask them, it marks you as a perv.



  •  @Zemm said:

    Those servers are stupid. You can't trust any of the received headers except the last (top) one. Spam measures that trust untrustable headers are not useful and cause more problems than they fix.
    Tell me about it. The stupid mail server at work is a black box with a stupid web interface. Apparently, using sendmail on a dedicated Linux server which we would have full control over would cost too much to maintain. So instead we have slider bar where you state how much spam you want. By default it blocks about 10% of spam, so you slide it to the right by one notch and you loose all communication with china (it seems like every email from them is marked as spam, and no, there is no quarantine area. Once mail is detected as spam, its deleted and impossible to recover). 

    Whats even more fun is that if a message is CC'd to several people (inside the same building, under the same domain) then it can be received to some of them, but not all of them, or you receive the email to some people and other will have the subject prepended with "POSSIBLE SPAM +++" (yes, in capital letters). In practice none of these "Possible spam" mails are actually spam.


  • @da Doctah said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @da Doctah said:

    Phrases like "uncontrolled rectal bleeding" tend to discourage further questions.

    Really?  Because it would just raise several questions with me.

     

    Raising such questions is normal.  But if you ask them, it marks you as a perv.

    That wouldn't exactly reveal anything new about morbs.



  • @da Doctah said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @da Doctah said:

    Phrases like "uncontrolled rectal bleeding" tend to discourage further questions.

    Really?  Because it would just raise several questions with me.

     

    Raising such questions is normal.  But if you ask them, it marks you as a perv.

     

     

    I just use the old "Sorry i forgot to book-in time off for my sex change opp" excuse.  The best part is, you can use this any number of even times, and nobody will check you for changes in behaviour if you are liying.

     




  • @untalented_newbie said:

    Said supervisor then proceeded to lay into me for not duly warning the team in advance about my absense
     

    So, he knew that you had been injured unexpectedly, and immediately afterword said that you should have warned them about the injury beforehand? Seriously? I mean... Seriously?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @PeriSoft said:

    @untalented_newbie said:

    Said supervisor then proceeded to lay into me for not duly warning the team in advance about my absense
     

    So, he knew that you had been injured unexpectedly, and immediately afterword said that you should have warned them about the injury beforehand? Seriously? I mean... Seriously?

    "Department Head" != "Supervisor"



  • @PeriSoft said:

    "Department Head" != "Supervisor"
     

    Still. If someone comes in presumably with a huge bandage around their neck, it would be nice to ask "so what happened" before assuming he has been slacking.

    To me there are a couple options here.
    1) this is not the first time there was some discussion, they basically don't trust him because of what happened earlier, and OP is on his way out.
    2) they are a bunch of moronic assholes, and OP should be on his way out.
    3) all of the above.

    Once you get to the point where you're having discussions about whether you really were sick, your car really broke down, or the dog really ate your homework, it's already too late. Get out fast while you can.



  • @b_redeker said:

    Still. If someone comes in presumably with a huge bandage around their neck, it would be nice to ask "so what happened" before assuming he has been slacking.
    They have probably had it before. I know we have. Someone takes 3 days off, comes in the 4th day with a neck brace, complaining. Gets sympathy and told to go home, forgets about the cameras in the car park which record them removing said brace, walking to there car, jumping in and driving off. Rewinding the footage, you see that didn't bother to wear it until they got out of the car too. 

    Cue phone call to them some time later to tell them not to bother coming back, but it's never that simple. 



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @da Doctah said:

    Phrases like "uncontrolled rectal bleeding" tend to discourage further questions.

    Really?  Because it would just raise several questions with me.

     


  • @b_redeker said:

    To me there are a few options here.
    1) this is not the first time there was some discussion, they basically don't trust him because of what happened earlier, and OP is on his way out.
    2) they are a bunch of moronic assholes, and OP should be on his way out.
    3) all of the above.
    FTFY


  • 🚽 Regular

    @untalented_newbie said:

    Because it was crunch time, I felt I should warn my job that I would be out the next day
     

    Wait, your job only asks you to "call in" when it's crunch time? WTF?



  • @bstorer said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    TRWTF is that he was playing hockey.  What, were there no open spots on the manicure team?
    Hey, you're not being fair.  Hockey features Canada's finest athletes!  And Russia's soberest athletes!  And the northern US's whitest athletes!

     

    Name one russian sober player! Didn't think so. Countrary to popular believe, russians don't require sugar to live, we get it straight from our alcohol.



  • @Heron said:

    It's just the default signature. You can change it to whatever you want, or disable it entirely.
     

    For blackberry you must log into the blackberry email registration site to change the automatic signature. Settings are not on the device. I hate BB, I wish people would have convinced me/wife that BB is a piece-of-shit-garbage-not-worth-the-plastic-its-made-out-of device.



  • @astonerbum said:

    @bstorer said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    TRWTF is that he was playing hockey.  What, were there no open spots on the manicure team?
    Hey, you're not being fair.  Hockey features Canada's finest athletes!  And Russia's soberest athletes!  And the northern US's whitest athletes!

     

    Name one russian sober player! Didn't think so. Countrary to popular believe, russians don't require sugar to live, we get it straight from our alcohol.

    I didn't say sober, I said soberest.  Russian hockey players are the guys sober enough to manage the walk out to the ice while wearing skates.


  • @astonerbum said:

    @bstorer said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    TRWTF is that he was playing hockey.  What, were there no open spots on the manicure team?
    Hey, you're not being fair.  Hockey features Canada's finest athletes!  And Russia's soberest athletes!  And the northern US's whitest athletes!

     

    Name one russian sober player! Didn't think so. Countrary to popular believe, russians don't require sugar to live, we get it straight from our alcohol.

    My Moscow Native girlfriend begs to differ on the alcohol.  But I, personally, am extremely grateful for russian standard :)


  • @galgorah said:

    My Moscow Native girlfriend
    Way to up the ante.  Most people just claim they have a Canadian girlfriend.



  • @bstorer said:

    @galgorah said:

    My Moscow Native girlfriend
    Way to up the ante.  Most people just claim they have a Canadian girlfriend.

    They have canadian mail order brides??? No complaint about the russian woman, but the shipping charges were killer.

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