I’ve Just Had the Wrong Perspective
16 Apr 2009
On vacation I had this dream, where the two robot sidekicks from Mystery Science Theater 3000 were sitting on my shoulder, and we were observing my life with the same running commentary style that they did in the MST3K show.
When I woke, I realized that I simply had the wrong perspective. I was treating my life as if it were an A-movie and I was the star of the show.
Reality is, my life is really a B-movie and I’m just sitting in the audience watching it unfold.
Instead of getting all bent about a crappy script, I need to just laugh at it with the two new voices in my head.
It wasn’t long… Our “crack” IT department at Progress hasn’t fixed a duplicate email/forum bug. For the single most important tool I use to communicate with the entire global Actional field, I (and the entire field and field support team) get duplicate email messages. One normal and one with all the formatting stripped. The format-less messages are queued up and sent in a whole batch, so it’s not even as easy as deleting every other message.
You know how many emails you have waiting when you get back from vacation, and how hard it is to sort through them to find the important stuff? Imagine that with over 50% repeated at random with all formatting removed! Oooh, fun!
We had a good laugh, but the party really started when one of the little guys said “wouldn’t it be funny if this bug also changed the delivery so the messages were out of order?”
Sure enough…
Which brings me to another thing I learned while I was away. Some things in life are too impossible to believe and so can only be true.
I’m back from vacation, and the party’s already started.
Afternoon fun update: Turns out, not only does it take out all the formatting and reorder the messages, it removes all the addresses (to/cc) except the forum address, so people are being left out of the conversation accidentally, and the conversations “branch” as a result when some people respond to the original message while others respond to the copy.
Apr 21, 2009 @ 11:04:25
If your getting all the emails twice and the forums ones are the same as the originals, you should be able to write an Outlook rule to handle the duplicate message (assuming you have used all your space for Outlook rules).
Just a thought
Apr 21, 2009 @ 11:21:20
Phillip,
Whether you are right or wrong, that is so far beyond the point as to be uselessly irrelevant!
When they disrupted the most important tool used by this company on a daily basis for team collaboration, they should have immediately backed out until the problem was resolved. Period. Not to mention, it should have been tested first, and clearly it wasn’t.
Personally, I think we need to (read as it’s imperative that we do, not optional) totally outsource our email and stop wasting time with it (and having the side benefit of it working better).
David
Apr 25, 2009 @ 16:37:35
I think that my life is a B-movie too. Wow, that’s actually a bit liberating. And it’s quite a lot less stressful to relax and watch the movie rather than be the writer/actor/director/producer. Thanks for the new perspective.
Apr 25, 2009 @ 18:26:29
It sure beats getting upset at a bad script! And, even lets us see the humor in the situation instead of getting all wound up.