Here’s the body of an email I just sent, from home, to my bevy of bosses:

I’m at my wit’s and temper’s end.

I fully appreciate that everyone works hard and has a lot on their plate. I understand that not everyone should have to become a computer guru in addition to their normal job skills. I believe, in fact, that I work with some of the smartest, hardest-working people in radio.

However, I can’t function if I’m given two directly opposing mandates and absolutely no support. I can’t make all of this “magic computer stuff” run if I have no assistance, no backing, no budget and no buy-in from management. Nobody’s being paid to care about what I do except when things go horribly wrong, for certain, but there should be some sort of middle ground between complete indifference and complete involvement. (By the way: In case you’re wondering, things are currently going horribly wrong. Apparently I spoke too soon on Thursday about being out of crisis mode.) I’ve become utterly, completely tired of being hated for trying to do my job.

How many times have I sent out all-staff emails telling people not to keep attachments in their email? How many times have I asked people to clean up their mailboxes? How many times have I insisted that email is not a storage medium? How often have I asked in Department Head meetings for ideas and feedback from managers on how we can handle the problems of email and file storage better? And that last is what really galls me. If nobody likes what I’m doing, how about working with me on ways to make things better for everyone? Heavens no. Apparently it’s much easier to just complain about me behind my back and over my head. Sure, that’ll help.

Of course all of this stuff is time-consuming. That’s why everybody wants someone else to do it. Problem is, “someone else” is me. For 200 people. And when I actually DO take care of things, I get in trouble because I got rid of something they absolutely needed.

The real problem is that everyone believes that this “computer stuff” is all taken care of by magic, and that I can just magically add more space, more power, more pretty monitors, more internet speed, more what-have-you, and that they should never ever have to actually do anything themselves. My time, my budget, and the realities of computer technology say otherwise… but nobody really cares about that.

Now I have a mandate from Corporate that says Thou Shalt Not Run Automated Purges Of Email. So I attempted to implement automatic archiving instead. But the problem is that archiving isn’t putting the slightest dent in our used storage. Why? Well, I have to get (slightly) technical for a moment to answer that question.

Think of a single emailed spot. It’s probably one megabyte in size. Now think of a single regular email with no attachment. It’s probably one one-hundredth the size of that spot. So if I archive off, say, 1000 regular old emails but we receive 10 spots… what have I accomplished? Nada. Nothing. Zip.

And that’s to say nothing of what happens when someone emails a Powerpoint presentation to their job-share partner.

I’m completely out of ideas. And in a few days, our email server will be completely out of space. I’m not allowed to do a damned thing about that, however, so I’m just going to try to do the rest of my job and wait for the inevitable. That is, unless someone comes up with a way to change the work habits and attitudes of everyone in the building.

I’ll see you all tomorrow. Have a profitable afternoon.

For reasons I won’t go into here, it’s been decreed that there shall be no more automatic deletions of emails. At all. Period.

Well that’s just dandy, because I have a server that’s chronically low on disk space and the only way I can keep it from crashing is to (you guessed it) purge emails that are oversized or very outdated. So, uh, now what do I do?

The answer, of course, is to implement archiving. On each account. Individually. One at a time. Within the next day or two. Or face a crashed email server.

You’d think they’d give me a bit more time in which to pull off the impossible, wouldn’t you? Ah well…

When you start the day with functional but slow and incomplete network-share browsing, and end it with no network-share browsing whatsoever, you know you haven’t exactly had the most productive working day ever.

When you “accomplish” this by following to the letter the precise instructions found on a half-dozen websites on the subject, instructions meant to solve the original problem, you know that the whole damned thing’s a scam and a waste of time.

When you realize that you’re the only person who really needs (and I’m using “needs” in the loosest possible sense of the word) to browse Microsoft Networking shares in the first place, you know that it’s time to just take a deep breath, shrug the whole thing off and move on to your next impending disaster…

We’re having email issues here at the office. This isn’t really a change from any other day, on the face of it, but what’s special about today’s issues is the phrasing of the complaints.

“Why are the spam mails getting through when the emails from my clients aren’t?”

I wish I had a good answer to that. Bleah. It’s only getting worse, day by day, and I’m not the guy with the power to change how the system works, so all I can do is shrug and commiserate. This doesn’t really help the situation much, but at least most of them understand that I’m not the bad guy here. I keep telling myself that this will count for something, some day.

Yes, I’m a dab hand at the self-delusion schtick. Why do you ask?

“Entrusting your data to spinning hunks of metal is no basis for a data storage system! Supreme data storage derives from solid-state equipment, not from some unstable rotating particles. I mean, if I went ‘round saying I had a storage system made up of flapping geese, they’d put me away!”

With apologies to the Pythoneers and, in fact, everybody.

I hate hard drives almost as much as I hate printers. Okay, maybe not nearly that much. But still.

Wait, wait…

I have to get up every weekday, again?

And work all day, each day?

No more days off for a while?

WAAAAAAAHHHH!

(This post brought to you by the new year and the end of my sporadic but oh-so-enjoyable vacation time… Yes, I spoiled myself absolutely rotten. We should all do that from time to time.)