But I neeeeed it

[protege]

One from Friday....and yes, our favorite idiot is involved.

Mid-way through a rather busy morning, Sarah started whining about how her email wasn't working...and hadn't been working for a week, and she really neeeeeded it. Naturally, I blew her off. I don't give a rat's ass if you neeeeed it. You waited until Friday and I'm busy. If it's that important, you need to tell me about it. I can't read minds. Trust me, if I could, would I be working here?

[dalesys]

The mind reader meets the tabula rasa....

[protege]

Sarah did it again today. Towards 3:00, she started whining that one of the intern computer's Outlook wasn't receiving messages, and hadn't been for "several days." News to me, since I spent an entire morning fixing it. She said that I apparently *didn't* fix it, since it didn't work. I couldn't take care of it, since I had more pressing tasks (aka "my job") to attend to. So, Melinda took care of it.

She confirmed what I already knew--Outlook was working fine. What really happened, is that the intern using the computer...was too lazy to click on "Send/Receive" and pick up his mail. I have a feeling that someone is getting reamed out on Monday...

[Gerrinson]

Shouldn't Outlook be set to send/recieve on a regular basis by default? I know we always set it to every 2 minutes most places I've worked.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Well, The Client's email system is sort of half-and-half. For users who use ADE (A Desktop Environment) to access the network, it uses one email system, which does do periodic refreshes. Likewise, the users who use Envy (a new desktop environment, which will eventually replace ADE altogether) and thus use Outlook also get periodic refreshes. Manual refreshes can be done at any time by clicking a button, and are sometimes necessary if there's been a bit of a network hiccup.

[Chromatix]

That's the thing. I recently had to spend some time with Windows on the desktop due to an on-site deployment, which was deeply annoying - especially as I was supposed to be developing Linux stuff at the time. You wouldn't believe the difficulty of working around Windows' lack of extensibility and limited software library when trying to do system-level development. The enforced monthly reboots to install security updates were also decidedly inconvenient when I had left a problem open at the weekend to come back to.

Part of that experience was trying not to go ballistic at Outlook. It seemed that trivial interruptions in network service would cancel the auto-refresh system, requiring manual intervention after you noticed it. Furthermore, it would never respond instantly to a message arriving - a feature which IMAP4 has made possible for many years - but would require that refresh cycle to take place. As for replying inline, which has been recommended in all reputable netiquette guides since the stone age - forget about it.

It really did feel like stepping back 20 years in user interface design and basic robustness from what I was used to - and that's starting from a Linux desktop, which some still disparage.

I can even justify that statement by pointing at the 20+ year old Mac IIcx that I'm currently bringing back to life. Finding reasonable Internet software to run on such an old machine is challenging to say the least, but it already has Eudora, which essentially set the standard for most subsequent e-mail clients, and iCab manages to do a reasonable job of rendering modern websites, with some patience.

The copy of Microsoft Word that survived on the original 40MB hard disk and runs happily in the original 5MB RAM is also entirely recognisable in operation, and seems to support all of the essential writing and formatting tools. Not bad for something that I rescued from a skip a decade ago.

[protege]

Shouldn't Outlook be set to send/recieve on a regular basis by default? I know we always set it to every 2 minutes most places I've worked.

It's supposed to do that. But, because we work for a financial services company, we have to archive everything for compliance purposes. Sometimes, the mail gets held up, because a 3rd party does the archiving. We can't archive things ourselves for legal reasons.