Too Much Information... Really.

Another user came to me the other day, worried about some pictures he couldn't delete. Apparently, he had some pictures (about 30-40 pictures) on his USB drive that he had taken of himself, by himself, in a hotel room. All I can say is, highly inappropriate pictures. Which he insisted in showing me, "so I'd understand how serious this was". 'Nuff said.

But he needed to use his USB drive to transfer a presentation to a meeting. So he copied the pictures into his "My Pictures", so they wouldn't just pop-up during the meeting. The trouble is two-fold; not only did he forget to move them back onto his USB drive afterward but user's folders are also redirected to a central file server, for ease of backup. These folder, in turn, are also subject to Windows Shadow Copy backups twice a day.

He panicked when he found that he could right-click on his "My Pictures" folder, select the "Previous Versions" tab and still find copies of those pictures. He had tried over and over to delete them but couldn't. Note that these are the shadow copies that Windows has made and not directly accessible by everyone. But he proceeded to ask me, in earnest, to help him delete those pictures from the server. I told him I'd look into it but really didn't have much hope at finding a way to do so. But before I could even look for a solution (having never come across a situation like this before), he wanted to show me that he wasn't the only one doing "crazy stuff like this". He pointed me to some videos in another user's folders; highly inappropriate videos, which he wanted to show me "so I'd understand that he's not the only one doing this type of stuff". Do these people even do any work?

So I look and find no way to remove these files (not surprised). And I discover that the Shadow Copy service only retains 30 days of backups, deleting the oldest as new ones are created. And his pictures are on the 3 oldest backups available. In other words, his pictures have been there for almost a month and he's just stumbled upon them. So I tell him not to worry, they'll be gone by the middle of next week and no one will be the wiser. He's sweating over this (literally) but thanks me for trying and agreeing to not tell anyone else at his company. And then he insists on shaking my hand.

I'm half-way considering requesting not to go back to this client.

Cell phones... are a pain.

So my Blackberry has decided to be a pain as of this morning. So far, it has crashed 7 times, forcing me to pull the battery to be able to do anything. Without it, I'm pretty dead in the water.

It always surprises my that fairly major companies demand a solid remote communication platform but put almost no thought or support into it. For example, I have a few clients that use various smartphones (Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm or iPhone) for business purposes. But they rely completely on their wireless providers' support for everything. Normally, not a problem. But when the phone actually breaks, they expect a replacement within a few minutes of walking into their store, sometimes simply within calling their support line. Very few carriers will do this unless the phone is very new or you've payed for the extended support contract. And the user either never thinks to get it or simply doesn't want to pay for it. Guess what, most wireless providers are *losing money* when they give you the phone for cheap. They make it up in the wireless plan you select and all the little options you add to that plan.

Morale: If you're going to use a smartphone for business, invest a little money into supporting that device.

Promote him!

I am a Systems Engineer in Silicon Valley (San Jose, CA, USA). I work on high-end servers all day; either setting up new servers, resolving issues that are present or running routine maintenance to (hopefully) prevent any new issues from appearing.

One client I work for has had no Network Administrator for the last 2 to 3 years. But they did have a Desktop Support guy. They hired us a couple years ago and we began working on their servers exclusively, to provide the best computing environment possible. Considering they wanted to spend nothing (literally), this has been a real challenge.

Recently, they decided that they needed someone on-site to coordinate all of the IT support tasks and they chose their Desktop Support guy. In fact, they promoted their Desktop Support guy to their IT Manager. However, considering the types of questions he constantly asks me and some of the choices I see him make, I have to seriously wonder if he has any experience in computers at all. He repeatedly asks questions that he could have Google'd faster than walking over to the IT office where I sit (2 doors away), consuming 1-2 (sometimes 3) hours a week asking these questions. And, when you consider that I'm only there 12 hours a week, that can be up to 25% of my time on-site. And I suspect he does the same thing to the other systems engineer that's only there 8 hours a week.

For example, they recently opened a new branch and, so far, it's taken him over a month to completely deploy a new server, for which he had a pre-configured system image. And since it has taken him so much time, he's dumped all of the desktop support tickets on us (the hired systems engineers), in addition to our normal server support (they have over 20 servers). But, since we probably cost their company about 4 to 5 times more per hour than him, I'm not sure he (or his boss) realizes the expenses he's costing the company.

But then, I'm just the hired Systems Engineer doing desktop support and this is just my opinion.