Today was full of AWESOME.

[Madrone]

Very nearly. Almost.

I worked 13 hours straight. No lunch, no breaks. Trying to prepare the rollout of a new server/service we are going to be implementing first thing next week. As usual - these things, even when SIMPLE, end up being more complicated, difficult, and/or time consuming than they should be.

We needed to send a mass email to all of our customers explaining, as carefully as possible, the change that is coming, what they can expect, how it's going to work, how awesome-ly cool it is, and above all - that they should under NO circumstances FREAK THE HELL OUT.

I am the one that gets to write this email. But then the mail server admin tells me that the thing that allows a single message to be sent to ALL accounts on the server was done by the software that was on our OLD mail server. The current mail server has a different software on it. Software that I chose AND installed on the current server that I ended up "co-building" with the admin. FUCK! No sense spending time composing the email until we know it can be sent, so I spend the next (???) hours searching Google for possible solutions to this dilemma while the admin does the same in his office on the other side of the state.

In between and in the midst of ALL these things, and all those things not yet mentioned, I'm having to take an extraordinary number of support (for me, I don't do much direct customer support anymore) calls. Talk about getting sidetracked. Repeatedly. Under a deadline!

The admin calls me to say he's figured it out!! He explains it to me, in detail. When I know my way around all of the config files and the syntax required to make it all happen we test it. CRAP! Another potential issue that probably WON'T happen - but it could, and it COULD be especially inappropriate if it did. We hang up and both go back to Google. Nothing I'm finding fits the problem - we're emailing back and forth. Finally he figures out an inelegant but not difficult and certainly functional work around to solve THAT problem.

I turn my attention to the system-wide, customer-directed email. I write it all out in one stream of consciousness, deciding to worry about any tweaking that needs to be done later. Draft one is damned near perfect in it's own right, but I start going through it and change some things for clarity (you can never be TOO CLEAR when talking to an end user. It is unfortunate but true that often even drawing a picture wouldn't be clear enough.). I also made changes to areas I'd used the same word too many times in. Once I got every word exact and just right I started futzing with adding links to online guides customers can utilize in the next few days in order to prepare for the coming change, then I moved on to verrrrrrrrrrrrrrry carefully formatting everything so that it was "just so."

The message was composed in MS Word, and I copied and pasted it into my email client. (Some of you more knowledgeable folks may be shaking your heads in understanding of what's to come at this point...) This required a somewhat extensive effort in further formatting everything so that it was JUST SO. Email composition windows aren't suited for things like "margins", for example. I finally got it. It was as good as it was going to get, and it was AWESOME. I mean I totally ROCKED that letter. Pure perfection in wording and expression. I not only think I couldn't have gotten it any better, I think no one else could have either. I am on a total "I kicked that letter's ASS" high - and that's a good thing because by this time I've been at work for 12 to 12.5 hours. Straight. And I've actually had to THINK for all of them.

But I'm no fucking idiot. It's a composition of pure perfection, sure. That doesn't mean I'm not going to test it from an end-users viewpoint to make sure it arrives in in their mailbox, perfectly formatted, links working and pointing to the right place, well laid out and easily readable. So I sent one to myself. And to GOPisEvil's Gmail account. (He happened to call my cell at that opportune time) He gets his email and reads it over. It looks great. I get mine, it's beautiful. Absolutely PERFECT. FULL OF AWESOME. Exactly as I intended. That sealed it. Message prepared and ready to send, but I pause for a moment. Once it's gone I can't get it back. It's going to EVERYONE on the server. THOUSANDS of people. The message "I" wrote representing not only my company but ME, and to one degree or another, my intelligence. Deep breath. Okay. SEND.

WOOHOOOOO! I SO fucking ROCKED that shit! I am SO tired but I worked hard and not only accomplished a great deal but produced something I was REALLY proud of!!! I start closing a ridiculous number of open windows and programs - it's after 9:30 pm. I got to work at 8 in the morning. I'm tired, but today was FULL OF AWESOME.

As I'm closing things down I get a new email. It's a reply to the system-wide email I just sent. It's late, I'm tired, but I am just SO f'ing high on myself .... what the hell. I'll take an additional minute or two to answer. Another reply comes in. I figure I may as well quickly respond to that one too. But this one looks weird. There are weird "code" things intermixed in the quoted text from the email I sent initially, the one she's replying to. Whatever. Homegirl uses INCREDIMAIL, it's all overly HTML-y with blinky, animated smile faces... hahaha! Those inferior email clients, they mess everything up. Whip her out a response, and I'm OUT.

On the way home I make a quick phonecall to a customer / friend to get his reaction to the email. He's a good person to bounce things off because he's not very technical and if he understands my technical explanations I know without a doubt I've done a good job of presenting the information. He starts reading it aloud ... but...wtf? Finishes another paragraph and... there it is again. WTF? Wait a second.... "Are you using Outlook Express to read your email?" He is. Oh. no.

I have no way of knowing how many people out of THOUSANDS are using Microsoft email clients. Our tightly knit IT department are no fans of MS email so we discourage it. We make other recommendations. People are still entitled to use what they wish.

Every.Single.Person.That.Uses.MSMail.In.Our.Entire.Network. Every one of those people got a very odd looking email message from ME, on behalf of my company. An email that containes multiple instances of this:

(edited to add: LOL! Today is not my day for proper formatting. Code examples below not displaying the actual code between the < >, which while not crucial to the story, doesn't quite convey the FULL effect.)

<!----> <!---->

<!---->

all around and between and distracting the eyes away from and confusing the actual CONTENT.


I'm more than a little mortified.

I guess it's too much to ask that text copied and pasted from one Microsoft product display properly when it finally ends up in ANOTHER MICROSOFT PRODUCT. :banghead:


Anyway, if you're read this far - I'm surprised. I wish I could offer you a better payoff, or at least a cookie for just wasting 5 or 10 minutes of your life on something that has no point. I'm exhausted but not tired, and felt like articulating these chains of events. If you enjoyed it, that's cool. :hi:


:silly:

[csziggy]

1. Word sucks, Outlook Express sucks, even Notepad sucks

Sorry you got caught in their suckage. Just look at it this way - if they use Outlook Express, they have probably seen plenty of messages fucked up in just that way. I know I have.

If I weren't stuck using Windows for the non-MS apps, I'd move to Linux.

[Madrone]

2. I'm sorry I got caught in their suckage too! LOL

Should have done the damned thing in OpenOffice. Not sure why it didn't occur to me. I guess I had too much overall going on today, and also had too much faith in the idea that if I emailed it out a couple of times FIRST I could view the end result and be assured it would be consistent.

When I got home I used Vista's "Windows Mail" to view it. Same deal. It looks SO ridiculous.


Hilarious that an end-user, customer directed email from a member of the IT staff is bunged up on such a grand (and well distributed!) scale!

[csziggy]

3. I haven't used Open Office much - can you save text with no formatting?

Even Notepad now seems to insert extra line breaks. I know it didn't when I was teaching myself HTML using it so I don't where that happened. But I need to edit some of my web pages and don't want to take the time to deal with a web app so I need a program to edit text without formatting.

Hope you can convince everybody it is a MS screwup and not anything you did!

[Madrone]

4. You know, I'm not sure.

I don't do word processing much, if at all. IF I do, it's very, very basic stuff. I DO know that OpenOffice doesn't seem to break stuff like MS Word does. I ALSO know that OpenOffice can not only open corrupted MSOffice files it also fixes them - at which point MSOffice can open them again. LOL

It's bizarre. You wanna be a GOD for someone that uses MS? Install OpenOffice on your machine and when you hear someone freaking out that they can't open an excel file or word document because the file is corrupt have them email it to you. Open the file in OpenOffice, then save it. That's IT. No magic, no voodoo. Click to open. Click to safe. MS document right as rain, OpenOffice a better MSOffice than MSOffice! ;)

You can do PDFs in it too.

[csziggy]

5. Cool - I'll have to try it. I have Open Office installed on the laptop

From the campaign. Someone needed to open an OO document and no one else could install apps on their computers. And that is about all I did with it, downloaded it, installed and then opened their document and saved as a DOC so she could email it out.

Good tip about the corrupted MS stuff - it could come in handy!

Thanks! I think we both need some sleep.

[Madrone]

6. Sleep?

Ugh. Alarm starts going off in 3.5 hours. I'm EXHAUSTED. But not tired. Too much heavy brain work for too long today. Winding down just isn't working for me.

I hope YOU get some decent rest. Have a good night! :hi: