SHARK TANK

Email nightmare

A user is responsible for the weekly company newsletter. But he can't upload the latest edition to the external server for the company intranet, reports pilot fish on the scene.

"The version that week contained a number of high-resolution images, scaled down but not reduced in file size," fish says. "The user called the external provider — without the assistance of the IT department — to determine why he couldn't upload it."

The helpdesk at the external provider tells user that the upload is failing because the newsletter file is too big.

Fish then receives the whopping 10MB email attachment in his in-box.

It seems the user decided the best thing to do was to email the newsletter to every person in the organisation — all 500 of them.

"This added a grand total of approximately 5GB to my Exchange database," says fish.

"Of course, a number of these recipients wanted to forward this email to their home, family and friends, so that they can look at the photos as well," fish groans.

Email nightmare II

User contacts helpdesk — via email — asking how he can reset his email password, because he's not receiving messages on his blackberry.

"After three replies, and three subsequent email complaints, I try calling the user to verify he's receiving our emails, and/or let him know that we've been replying, and his email problem is larger than he thought", pilot fish recalls.

Upon calling the user's office number, an answering service immediately picks up on the first ring, and takes a message. "(user) isn't available right now, but if you leave him a message, we'll get him to call you back."

Fish confirms that it is indeed an answering service, and ask how they convey messages to their clients.

"we email them."

Software is weightless

Project administrator pilot fish recalls that at his last job, hiscoworkers knew that he had a degree in IT, so he was sometimes called upon to troubleshoot their PC problems, instead of the helpdesk at head office.

"One day, I received a phone call asking me that if additional programs were added to the hard drive of their laptop, would the laptop be heavier, since the user was adding new software to it," fish recalls.

"I spent about 10 minutes explaining how the read/write function of the hard drive worked and assured the user that the act of adding new/additional programs would decrease the emptyness of the hard drive but not add any physical weight to it because all you are doing is rearranging the molecules of the hard drive".