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.