What GoDaddy Was Like (In Pictures)

[Bunk]

I love these threads.

We had a call from a customer with an account with four users on it yesterday. Each user in the software gets their own login, so that they all can use it at once. Each user has seperate tasks, email, etc , in the system.

The lady wants us to change all four usernames and passwords to the same thing, so that they will be easier to remember.

She wants all four logins to be identical...

It took almost five minutes to make her understand the problem with this idea.

[schild]

I took over 40,000 calls at GoDaddy. if I had drawn every single one, it would take an encyclopedic volume to contain them. I should have. Also, they all could have been drawn. GD caters to the stupid. But then, with the nascar and white trash models, I suppose you knew that.

[Signe]

I don't watch NASCAR now that Dario has been sacked.  I hate Chip Ganassi.  There is still Indy, though, and the angry manliness of Danica.

[schild]

I have no clue what you're talking about. Racing is a bullshit sport.

[Paelos]

I'm not extremely technical or a network whiz, but I know just enough to be dangerous. The problem I've found in every version of business that I've worked in is that the IT department usually knows what they are doing, but they are the shittiest communicators on the face of the earth. They just assume that changes made to the system or the email don't need to be communicated to the staff, and then when something goes wrong because of it, everyone gets pissy.

Also, people never delete emails. It's ridiculously uncanny. Our email server was constantly overloaded because people had email from 2 years ago. Seriously, it's not tax information, it's email.

[Kitsune]

She must be very pretty.

No.  God no.  But she'll work for the relatively small amount I can pay her, and she's not lazy and incompetent compared to everyone else who applied.  And if you've ever tried to hire basic office staff, you'll know just what horrifying dregs of humanity arrive for the position.

[Salamok]

Also, people never delete emails. It's ridiculously uncanny. Our email server was constantly overloaded because people had email from 2 years ago. Seriously, it's not tax information, it's email.

lol I managed the network for an office of 25 people with 60gig of mail on our exchange server.... err well I suppose if it had 60 gig of mail you couldn't really say I "managed" it but anyhoo I was the guy they called when shit broke. 

On top of the 60 on our server I archived the owners stuff to pst once a year, he had an aditional 10gig of his own stuff stored that way.

[Bunk]

I have well over 2 GBs worth of .pst files from the six years I have worked for this company.  At least I dump them off of the exchange server and in to pst's.

[Phildo]

My favorite conversation from my time at godaddy:


Me: What web browser are you using?
Woman: Oh, I have The Googles!

(she was, like many people, typing her urls into the google search bar and wondering why her site didn't show up)

[HaemishM]

The Googles. Sounds like a disease where all your web browsing turns into GIS Goatsex pics.

[Merusk]

Also, people never delete emails. It's ridiculously uncanny. Our email server was constantly overloaded because people had email from 2 years ago. Seriously, it's not tax information, it's email.

And you never know when it's going to bite you in the ass that you deleted something.  I worked with a guy who had 8 banker boxes full of old printed-out memos and telephone logs.  His e-mail was just as full and it was common knowledge he did this - hell it was a bit of an office joke.  People STILL tried to pawn shit off as his fault or his decision or would ask "what stupid asshole decided we should move that door in the first place?"   He'd go back to his files, pull out the info and point out to the Division President or the Builder or whatever other random asshole causing problem that they or someone higher than them said to do it.     (This was common for all divisions, but he was the only guy who kept track of his shit.)

[schild]

I have emails going back a decade. Just sayin.

[Tale]

Various cases come up where I've been asked to put something on a website, for which my parent publication or TV network ends up getting sued or pursued by media watchdogs and I am named in the case. Apart from minimising my risk by not using certain stories, I can't know what it's going to be, so I delete only big file attachments, spam, press releases and emails from the audience. In a workplace that enforces a 300Mb maximum on mailbox sizes and refuses to give me any more space. I'm reduced to picking low-risk people and deleting all email from them.

[Ookii]

Ha, our limit is 85mb.  Some people have 5 different PSTs FTW.

[Phildo]

Oh, I got Lemon Partied once too.  Some web designer had a falling out with the owner of the website so he locked the server and the site was a redirect to lemon party.

Another guy tried to get GoDaddy to sponsor his bass fishing boat...

[Paelos]

Also, people never delete emails. It's ridiculously uncanny. Our email server was constantly overloaded because people had email from 2 years ago. Seriously, it's not tax information, it's email.

And you never know when it's going to bite you in the ass that you deleted something.  I worked with a guy who had 8 banker boxes full of old printed-out memos and telephone logs.  His e-mail was just as full and it was common knowledge he did this - hell it was a bit of an office joke.  People STILL tried to pawn shit off as his fault or his decision or would ask "what stupid asshole decided we should move that door in the first place?"   He'd go back to his files, pull out the info and point out to the Division President or the Builder or whatever other random asshole causing problem that they or someone higher than them said to do it.     (This was common for all divisions, but he was the only guy who kept track of his shit.)

Yes, well there's a difference there. If it's important you print it out and file it away. Big decisions, big memos, major orders, yadda yadda. Accountants do that all the time with almost all of their information. The joke is that you can't take a dump as a public accountant unless you document it. Still, I deleted all email that was a year old. That's your time frame.

[Merusk]

The technophile's question to you is: Why print it out when you can keep it indexed, sorted and at the end of a quick 'search' command while taking up 0 'real' space if its still saved digitally?

[Paelos]

The technophile's question to you is: Why print it out when you can keep it indexed, sorted and at the end of a quick 'search' command while taking up 0 'real' space if its still saved digitally?

Because concrete documents can't be wiped out by server failures, errors, viruses, and other common technical hoo-hah. They can be burned or lost, and that's about it.

[Selby]

Because concrete documents can't be wiped out by server failures, errors, viruses, and other common technical hoo-hah. They can be burned or lost, and that's about it.

Everything is savable, everything is possible to be lost.  Much easier to keep multiple physical storage devices for files than it is to have to file everything in boxes and move around.  Our company's policy is "everything older than 6 months must be deleted legally!" but I have email back to the day I started (years ago).  It's only 5GB of data, but I store it on my computer and on the local multi-TB file server.  I delete useless shit like jokes and duplicates, but I have every bone-headed decision I and anyone else I communicated with stored away for future reference.  And yes, I have gone back to 2004 and 2005 and referenced schematics and drawings from a much older revision and hunted down schedules and dates that were promised and reneged on with a comment of "we never said that!"

[Samwise]

Text takes up so little space that it's easier to keep it forever than it is to decide what to delete.  All my email for the past 10 years or so is only a few gigs, and most of that is old attachments that I would throw out if the storage they took up cost more than what is literally pocket change.  I keep one copy on my current desktop PC (it gets moved from machine to machine when I upgrade) and another copy on a cheap external drive.  In another 10 years I have no doubt that I'll be able to fit it all on a $5 thumbdrive or its futuristic equivalent.

[bhodi]

Disk space is cheap.

[CharlieMopps]

I worked for Palm Inc. about 8 years ago. Once I had a dude call in and ask what the Azimuth of our satellite was... I replied "Um... I don't think we have a satellite..."

He apparently thought we beamed emails into his palm via our orbital space platform and his $60 handheld would pick them up for him. He was very upset when he found out he actually needed a computer to sync the emails over. I told him to go buy a blackberry... he said "But those are like $500" Satellites are expensive... I didn't bother explaining the whole cell tower thing. Jackass.

[Tale]

I bothered a tech support guy tonight.

My personal website (and email redirection) got suspended because my credit card details have changed, I'd forgotten my password for the hosting provider's system, and my email address had changed so I couldn't get a password reminder. Phoning them is not practical because I'm in Australia and they're in the US.

So I decided to open an email-only account with my old ISP, re-creating the old email address. Sales (outsourced) didn't understand, so passed me to tech support (in-house). They still had my details and to finish the job, he wanted to email me @ my domain. But that was suspended ... so I told him my tale of woe and why I was setting up the account.

I could hear him drawing.

[Sky]

I was working on a staff computer, some email issue. I had her log into her email and there were no messages or subfolders. "That's odd," I said, "Have you been able to see your email today?" "Oh yes," she replied, "I printed one out." "Well, they seem to be gone now." "I only needed the one I printed out." Turns out she prints out important emails and keeps them in her file cabinets and deletes everything, she has zero email on the server. I did explain to her how the email server is backed up, how little space text takes up, and how email is indexed for searching. Eh, some people, they funny.

I'm in the camp of stripping attachments and keeping everything else. I do delete most stuff like ads or meaningless conversations.

[Murgos]

I'm in the camp of stripping attachments and keeping everything else. I do delete most stuff like ads or meaningless conversations.

I don't understand this.  I keep the meaningless conversations.  Every now and then I'll go looking for something and come across some long dialogue I had with a forgotten friend or girl-friend.

I have email going back about 12 years now, most of my life is touched on in there.  Moves, people, jobs, happenings, events, pcitures and etc...  It costs me nothing to save it, actually it is easier to save it than it is to remove it.

[Trippy]

Yup I've saved all my email as well. I've got email messages stored away that are "older" than many of you

[Sky]

I don't understand this.  I keep the meaningless conversations.  Every now and then I'll go looking for something and come across some long dialogue I had with a forgotten friend or girl-friend.

I don't have long and meaningless dialogues :)

[Paelos]

I don't understand this.  I keep the meaningless conversations.  Every now and then I'll go looking for something and come across some long dialogue I had with a forgotten friend or girl-friend.

I don't have long and meaningless dialogues :)

Me either, not in email anyway. Sure talking on the phone, maybe. Still, saying email from the times of YORE will always seem packrattish to me.

[Salamok]

The technophile's question to you is: Why print it out when you can keep it indexed, sorted and at the end of a quick 'search' command while taking up 0 'real' space if its still saved digitally?

Because concrete documents can't be wiped out by server failures, errors, viruses, and other common technical hoo-hah. They can be burned or lost, and that's about it.

can also be shredded! archiving every last bit of your email can also work against you in court.

Keeping your email around is great if it is actually useful, my boss had 15 gig of email and yet I quite often got the old "Can you forward me back that email I sent you a month ago, I can't seem to locate it in my sent items".  So if yer too lazy to index it or too stupid to do an advanced search for it, then it is pretty much useless.

There is also a huge difference between managing your own PST's and expecting your exchange administrator to manage your mail.  I was always leary of turning on autoarchive because I knew the end users would hit the 2gb limit pretty fast and dork their file.  By the time M$ upped the limit (20 gig now?) we were already doing things another way.

[naum]

When I worked in corporate settings, I printed critical emails and took them home for storage in manila file folder(s).

If there is a conflict and a higher ranking employee puts the screws to you, those electronic emails go poof from the system. And your only recourse will be those printouts (with message headers) showing culpability with the company, not you.

It might even net you a settlement package.

[Ingmar]

When I worked in corporate settings, I printed critical emails and took them home for storage in manila file folder(s).

If there is a conflict and a higher ranking employee puts the screws to you, those electronic emails go poof from the system. And your only recourse will be those printouts (with message headers) showing culpability with the company, not you.

It might even net you a settlement package.

Only if you have totally corrupt email admins. And you can end up in jail for that sort of thing, as our email admin if I got a request like that from anyone I'd be going straight to the head of HR. (I haven't decided for sure what I would do if the request came *from* the head of HR but our CEO is a pretty stand up guy so he'd probably be next.)

[naum]

When I worked in corporate settings, I printed critical emails and took them home for storage in manila file folder(s).

If there is a conflict and a higher ranking employee puts the screws to you, those electronic emails go poof from the system. And your only recourse will be those printouts (with message headers) showing culpability with the company, not you.

It might even net you a settlement package.

Only if you have totally corrupt email admins. And you can end up in jail for that sort of thing, as our email admin if I got a request like that from anyone I'd be going straight to the head of HR. (I haven't decided for sure what I would do if the request came *from* the head of HR but our CEO is a pretty stand up guy so he'd probably be next.)

Even if emails are not deleted, you could be walked out the door and your account erased and you would not have access to those emails even if they are still on the server.

And perhaps SOX and other recent legislation has altered this behavior, but I recall when working for a major charge card company, where employees were instructed to delete all emails regarding a given topic (in one case it was Y2K but there were other instances also regarding third party vendors and potential liability).

[Ingmar]

When I worked in corporate settings, I printed critical emails and took them home for storage in manila file folder(s).

If there is a conflict and a higher ranking employee puts the screws to you, those electronic emails go poof from the system. And your only recourse will be those printouts (with message headers) showing culpability with the company, not you.

It might even net you a settlement package.

Only if you have totally corrupt email admins. And you can end up in jail for that sort of thing, as our email admin if I got a request like that from anyone I'd be going straight to the head of HR. (I haven't decided for sure what I would do if the request came *from* the head of HR but our CEO is a pretty stand up guy so he'd probably be next.)

Even if emails are not deleted, you could be walked out the door and your account erased and you would not have access to those emails even if they are still on the server.

And perhaps SOX and other recent legislation has altered this behavior, but I recall when working for a major charge card company, where employees were instructed to delete all emails regarding a given topic (in one case it was Y2K but there were other instances also regarding third party vendors and potential liability).

SOX et. al. does have a lot to do with it, I think, yeah, but so does the march of technology. Every year it gets a little harder to totally hide your tracks in a corporate system.

If you ever *are* in a situation like that, make sure your lawyer works on getting the email backups subpoenaed (or discovered, or whatever the term is) along with everything else. In most environments it might be easy to disappear everything off of the server, but going back and disappearing it off of every single backup tape that it might appear on is another matter entirely.

[Righ]

Racing is a bullshit sport.

Even Mario Kart?

[Signe]

TEE HEE.