DeuceTech

I went out on a call recently because one of our computer users reported that she could not create a new calendar entry in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003. When I arrived, she was not at her computer and no one in the area seemed to know where she was or when she would return. Upon checking the machine, I found that she had two instances of Outlook open along with about five or six Excel spreadsheets. I expected that I would have to repair the Office installation, so I needed to close all of the open applications. Of course, as I closed each item, I elected to save each one to avoid losing any of her work and so, I just saved each spreadsheet to its existing name and location. After I closed everything and reopened Outlook, I found that it was working properly and so I left without doing anything further. By the time I returned to my desk, one of my coworkers had already been on the phone with the computer user who had called because “all of her work was gone!” I immediately called her back and explained that I had simply saved each item without changing any of the names or locations, so each file could simply be reopened from wherever she had originally created and saved the documents.

The real problem, as it turned out, was that she had received one of those spreadsheets as an Outlook email attachment and she had opened it without ever doing a “Save as…” to save it locally. She had been working for three hours inputting new numbers into the spreadsheet and had never once stopped to save it somewhere like her desktop or her “My Documents” folder. Then, prior to my arrival, she had just walked away from the computer, still without ever saving her work. I had her search for the file by name and then by modification date, but when the file was found and she opened it, she said it was the original file without her changes. During all of this, I insisted that I simply saved all of her files and I alluded to the fact that she should have saved something that was so important and that she had put so much time into. I said something to the effect that I would never have worked on something like that without saving it and I certainly would never have walked away with something like that open and unsaved knowing that someone was coming to repair a problem. She became somewhat defensive telling me “well, that is you!” and “I didn’t think you would come so soon!” I ended up going back to her office to help search for the temporary file which I knew held her saved work. After I got there, she admitted that she had reopened the original file from the email and saved it again which meant that she probably had overwritten the one that I had saved earlier.

The final thing that came out and the one that troubled me most was that she new exactly how and where to dig down through the hidden folders and files on her computer to the place where Outlook stores its temporary files such as attachments that are opened from withing an email. I told her so much too. I told her that the fact that she knew how to do that so easily indicated to me that this was something normal for her and that it really was a very bad practice. I certainly was never impolite to her, but I wanted her to realize that this data loss was a result of her own mistakes, not because of something I did wrong. In the end, she made the statement that she had “learned her lesson” to which I responded that despite the loss of three hours of work, maybe this “lesson” would help her to avoid an even bigger loss later on.