At 10:15 this morning, everyone in my College was sent an e-mail (that was clearly not spam) titled "Please log off immediately
" from our IT support staff. It included the following very terse message (along with the usual greeting, etc):
Please log off until further notice as you are at risk of data loss. This also applies even if you believe that your computer is o.k.
Naturally, this made me feel some sense of panic. I was at the office. I considered delaying an imminent meeting so I could go and make sure my computer wasn't connected to the internet. (I didn't really know what they meant by "log off.") However, I had just backed everything up yesterday, so I figured I'd just recover everything that way in the event that something weird happened. Also I had no clue what the cause might have been or in general anything of what was apparently going on. Were we under attack? Was the world about to end, taking all of our data with it? I had no idea. The content of the message that I quoted constituted the entirety of the message body (aside from the greeting, etc.). Then my student came and we met for an hour, after which I sent the following e-mail at 11:22 to the IT folks in response to their message:
I am not at home and hence unable to log off at such short notice. (I
realize this is apparently beyond your control in this case.)
Could you let us know what's going on?
After my next meeting, I went home at 12:30 and unplugged my ethernet cable and went to lunch. I would then deal with a couple of things at the office and call up the IT folks to see what was going on if I didn't hear from them at that point.
At 2:11 pm, just before I was going to call, I received the following private e-mail from them:
There is no need to worry, there was a problem with the administration staff's
computers earlier today and an email was sent out to everyone rather than just
the admin by mistake.
If upon your return to Somerville there seems to be any problem with your
ability to log on to your computer or with the email, please reboot your
machine as this should clear up any remaining issues.
So I have a question: If the original e-mail was sent out to everyone by mistake (and ask you can see that e-mail was titled and worded in a way that could reasonably be expected to cause panicky reactions in people), why wasn't there an immediate follow-up letting them know that they could safely ignore it because it didn't apply to them?
Thanks a lot, guys. Way to run a tightly-oiled machine.
(Am I being unreasonable here? It seems to me that this could have been handled much better than it was in almost every respect. Maybe I'm just missing something entirely.)
Update: Errr..., I mean a "tight ship" or "well-oiled" machine. I'm not quite sure what it means for something to be tightly-oiled, although I do recognize the term as a compound adjective...
3 hours ago
3 comments:
I think I like "tightly-oiled machine".
It's fair to be a little irked at the original mistake. It's *not* really fair to be bothered that it took that long to respond to you.
Look at it this way -- they had a bit of a crisis situation, and were trying to fix something (who knows what) before there was additional data loss.
They sent out a bit of a goof-up email, probably resulting in a rather large number of "WTF?" emails coming back.
What's they're priority -- finish the actual, presumably time-critical task they are already in the middle of, or deal with a rash of misunderstandings resulting in a goofed-up email (which was there mistake)?
Now, they could maybe have sent another mail clearing things up, but it's unlikely they were even reading their mail at that point -- too busy putting out fires to pull cats out of trees.
From their phrasing in the follow-up to everybody (which never indicated that the issue was always localized... I'm a little surprised they didn't mention that explicitly at that point when there was definitely no sense of urgency around), I got the impression that the other thing was much less urgent than their original e-mail made it sound.
Note that my statement above says nothing at all about your point, which is well-taken. I just have the general impression that despite the original message it turns out that they never believed it was as urgent as the original message led me to believe. If they didn't check their e-mail, then indeed they should not pull cats out of trees assuming there is actually a fire. I'm completely with you on that! (And I suppose it is the phrasing in the follow-up e-mail to everyone---and the complete lack of comment that the situation was never more than a local one----that I didn't previously mention that is contributing to my cynicism that it isn't just a matter of not seeing a mass of WTF e-mails because of trying to actually solve the problem.)
Anyway, globally I agree with you, but I can't stop my heart and mind from going in cynical directions.
Point taken -- on re-reading it, I'm left completely uncertain as to how big of a deal it was. Assuming it *wasn't* a big deal, they definitely could have been more prompt about clearing up the confusion.
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