Some people...

Most of you that read this know that we are in the process of upgrading all of our desktops at work. This means for the last two months, we have been constantly reminding everyone to make SURE they have all their important files stored on their home directory. These directories are on our file servers, which means they are backed up and will also still be available to them when their desktop is replaced. Simple concept right? Apparently not.

So far we have had at least 3 people suddenly need their old desktop back because they forgot files on that machine. After repeated emails and our techs asking them point blank when they are swapping out machines "Did you get all your files moved to the network?" .. they still didn't get it done. This requires us digging through piles of old machines to find their. Time consuming and pointless. But hey.. we are a 'service' department and we live to please! Or at least thats what I think we are supposed to believe.

Yesterday however, took the cake. I had a frantic user call up because he wanted to make sure that somehow, someway, he got a machine with a floppy drive in it. You know, those little 3.5" square things that people used to use before the invention of the CD Drive, DVD Drive and USB drives? Yeah.. those things. Why did he need one? He is still storing important business data on floppies. Never mind the fact that he has access to both his personal network share as well as several departmental ones to store it on. Never mind the fact that floppies have a high failure rate. Never mind that floppy drives were NOT purchased for the new machines on purpose. Never mind that their massive 1.4MB of storage is about as useful as a talented musician would be to a Rascall Flats concert.

I tried to patiently explain that he should copy the data off those floppies to the network share and he was concerned that it would "Take up too much space on the network". I told him to do it anyway, that living on the edge was life was all about! He wasn't convinced. I then told him to do it anyway because when those floppies broke, I was going to go down to his desk with the midget rodeo clown I am going to hire for the sole purpose of taunting him for being a moron.

After about 20 minutes of dealing with this rocket surgeon, I finally get him off the phone with his assurances that he is backing up his files and whatnot. 10 minutes after that I get a call from him saying that after he deleted some files off his hard drive, that some of the files on the network share for his department aren't working. I figured he accidentally deleted some of the network files, so I set about tracking them down to restore them. Only all I found was shortcuts on the network share.

Instead of actually copying or moving the files to the network share, he just copied shortcuts to them. Then of course, he proceeded to delete them from his hard drive. Oh, and these were not files he backed up to his almighty floppies. Now I realize that not everyone is a 'computer' person. But c'mon. It says "Shortcut to blahblah". The options when you drag a file over to a location like that are: Copy Here, Move Here or Create Shortcut Here. Two of those options would have worked fine for him. But he managed to pick the third and entirely useless option.

Needless to say, he was rather upset when he was informed by me that he was SOL on those files. He was also upset when he called every other person in my department and got the same answer about his files and his stupidity.

I suppose I should be thanking him though. Its people like him that make me want to hit him in the face with a shovel keep me employed. So I salute you Mr. ChampionOfTheFloppyDrive. Party on!