• Russ (unregistered) in reply to snoofle

    Actually, this sounds like a precursor to del.isio.us. Tags are Daughter-in-law, grandchild, kids, etc (I hope that last isn't really a tag).

    Maybe she just needs to use more tags?

  • Susanna (unregistered)

    This reminds me of a file naming scheme I came up with many years ago during a long-term temp job. In college I'd had a Mac and this job was my first time using Windows (3.1).

    The way I understood file extensions, they were used to categorize things: .doc were word processing documents, .xls were spreadsheets, etc. I felt like the default "categories" in Windows didn't quite meet my needs, so I started changing the file extensions on some documents. When I typed a letter, I put the initials of the person I typed it for as the extension, so letters for Jane Doe would be LETTER1.JD, LETTER2.JD, and so on. I thought this was a clever way to work around the 8 character limitation. Windows always asked me which application I wanted the new extension mapped to so I never had a problem opening the documents. Until...

    Shortly before that temp job ended, I had to make a spreadsheet for someone I had previously typed a letter for. I tried to save the spreadsheet as STORES1.JD. I forget exactly what Windows did then, but I remember it asking me something about switching the .JD file extension to denote Excel documents. I began to suspect that I had done something I shouldn't have with my clever naming convention.

    But at that point, the office was packing up to move to another city and I had to help get everything ready to move. There was no time to go back and untangle the mess I'd made. I sometimes wonder what happened to the unsuspecting admin in that new city who inherited my job and my well-categorized files.

  • (cs) in reply to Saladin

    So stupid. So AMAZINGLY stupid.

    First off, the whole point of computers is that you don't need to use crappy naming schemes like 11101010010101010000100101---100100101010 anymore...The computer does that for you, so you can call it whatever the hell you want, and the computer will add the human unreadable name somewhere where no human will ever have to read it.

    Second. Search features? ANYONE? Why bother keeping documents if you can't FIND what you're looking for? You just like storing things? Stupid.

    Just looking at this I made up a single table database in my head that only has 10 fields and would be infinitely more efficient. What is wrong with people?

  • (cs) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:
    What is wrong with people?

    The answer is in the question. Being a computer-illiterate human what's wrong with people. Unfortunately, when an illiterate comes in contact with a computer, they think it's an alien planet that doesn't follow the laws of reality. Therefore, where they may store food in a logical order in a refrigerator or group their socks by color, they insist on ordering things on a computer by some other asinine logic, such as who sent it or when it was received instead of the logical "topic" approach.

  • Chris (unregistered) in reply to Charles M
    Charles M.:
    Sadly enough, situations like this are very common in Japan. There is no lexical ordering over the character set so one can't really put things in "alphabetical" order.

    Er, yes, you can. How do you think Japanese dictionaries work? Any word can be written phonetically in kana (the syllabary) and "alphabetized" on that basis. That fact that some Japanese offices don't is their own WTF; the solution is there.

    The Chinese, now, they have it tough. There are still accepted systems for ordering the characters, though (generally starting with the stroke count).

    Chris

  • Joachim Otahal (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    My mother does filing like this - My name starts with "S" (no, not snoofle), but am under K for "kid".

    My wife saw this and thought it was a wonderful idea.

    Are all women like this, and why? Why? WHY?

    Quite simple: Self centered view, only THEIR view is the right since it is from THEIR point of view, all others are wrong. Not all are like that, but IMHO too many.

  • Joachim Otahal (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    My wife is even worse - she files stuff under (K) for kid or (C) for child, then can't remember where she put it and asks me to find it for her. Grrr. I mean, I love her more than life itself, but Grrr!

    Well, consider yourself lucky, she doesn't blame it on you! Keep her, the thing you tell is the fun to accept.

  • andywebsdale (unregistered)

    This story really shocked me - can it be true? She should have been cleaning the office, not working there during business hours.

  • (cs) in reply to Chris
    Chris:
    The *Chinese*, now, they have it tough. There are still accepted systems for ordering the characters, though (generally starting with the stroke count).
    Nope, stroke count is usually the secondary index, the primary is the "radical", the "most important" part of the character, which might be the right one, left one or buried somewhere in the middle. Somewhat inconvenient and failure-prone, but workable, especially when you do it failure-tolerant by softlinking stuff in places where you might look if you choose the wrong part of a character as radical.

    Actually I suspect nowadays the most common ordering schemes are based on pronounciation i.e. the latin alphabet via Pinyin.

  • (cs) in reply to AbbydonKrafts
    AbbydonKrafts:
    Saladin:
    ...parallels to Silent Hill? ...
    Nice. Loved that movie, BTW.

    Game. Loved that game, you mean.

    The movie was crap compared to the four Konami titles.

  • (cs)

    I used to be a sorting freak for my photos, until I began using photo management software, like F-Spot and Picasa (sp?) and stuff like Flickr.

  • Shinobu (unregistered) in reply to WhatTheFaq
    WhatTheFaq:
    Charles M:
    Sadly enough, situations like this are very common in Japan. There is no lexical ordering over the character set so one can't really put things in "alphabetical" order. Instead, someone - usually someone who has worked there forever - owns the filing system and is the only one who can find anything. Offices have shut down when that person leaves.

    Utter rubbish. Dunno why this one keeps popping up, but Japanese does have a freaking "alphabetical" order and offices don't fall apart when workers leave or die.

    Quite succinctly stated. For the uninitiated, words can in principle be spelt out using kana, which denote the pronunciation. So you can file stuff as if the title or whatever you wish to sort by were spelt out in kana. Of course there are several different ways to sort on kana, which fall in two categories:

    1. a-i-u-e-o-jun or gojuuon-jun is a standard ordering based on pronunciation of the characters.
    2. iroha-jun is a standard ordering based on a Buddhist poem that has largely fallen out of use for reference works.
    brazzy:
    Chris:
    The *Chinese*, now, they have it tough. There are still accepted systems for ordering the characters, though (generally starting with the stroke count).
    Nope, stroke count is usually the secondary index, the primary is the "radical", the "most important" part of the character, which might be the right one, left one or buried somewhere in the middle. Somewhat inconvenient and failure-prone, but workable, especially when you do it failure-tolerant by softlinking stuff in places where you might look if you choose the wrong part of a character as radical.

    Actually I suspect nowadays the most common ordering schemes are based on pronounciation i.e. the latin alphabet via Pinyin.

    Actually Chinese and Japanese dictionaries tend to have multiple indices. Commonly, all characters are given an arbitrary index number according to where in the book they appear. The kanji could be ordered by radical or stroke count or not at all. Sometimes they are ordered by grade level, which is useful for teaching purposes. Than in the back (or sometimes the front) of the book there are several indices, e.g. by stroke count, by radical, by reading, etc. Looking up a character in the index is relatively straight-forward, and then you just look up the kanji by index number.

    It wasn't always that way though: one of the first kanji dictionaries was ordered by the part of the kanji that carried the meaning of the character. It originally didn't come with an index, so if you wanted to look up the meaning of a character...

  • SnapShot (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Not that you should have to (or want to), but since the submitter seems to need to...

    Here's how to debug Alessa's brain:

    1. Temporarily tell everyone to stop submitting documents (may not be necessary depending on office size and frequency of submissions)
    2. Create a hello-world Word document
    3. Take a dump of the index table
    4. Have Alessa insert the Word document
    5. Take another dump of the index table
    6. do a diff - one entry will be for the file, the other for its type
    7. repeat for spreadsheet, powerpoint, visio, ...

    Voila! You have reverse engineered (at least part of) the female mind!

    Come on people! The files are in a nested hierarchy on a SHARED DRIVE. This is a five minute exercise in recursive programming in whatever language you have access to.

    1. Start at root directory
    2. Read directory list
    3. For each file a. if it is a file; build an index; toss it in lucene; slice it; dice it; whatever... b. for each folder goto 2.

    Make the intern do it...

    (I haven't read through all the comments. I apologize in advance if this is redundant).

  • Watson (unregistered) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Are all women like this, and why? Why? WHY?
    Men are from Mars, Women are from 101245.
  • Grassfire (unregistered) in reply to Troy Mclure
    Troy Mclure:

    Reminds me of a story I heard about a guy who worked in the warehouse doing inventory. He would hide certain products so no one could find them and inevitably when asked he could find it in 2 seconds. Took them a LONG time to figure out he wasnt really good at his job, he had just figured out how to ensure his job security for a while.

    I had a friend who could never be bothered remembering e-mail addresses. He had his own domain "Mydomain.com.au". So he set up e-mails to redirect. eg, to e-mail his wife, rather than using "[email protected]", he would send to "[email protected]" and the redirect would forward it accordingly.

    Last time I talked to him he had:

    Captcha: howdy - wow, that is actually appropriate!

  • Leo (unregistered) in reply to Watson
    Watson:
    snoofle:
    Are all women like this, and why? Why? WHY?
    Men are from Mars, Women are from 101245.

    More consequent then my cellphone.

    I really won't call my parents by their forenames. So the family-phone is called <hometown>, the cellphone of my mother "mother cell" and the one of my father "father cell".

    After all: this is my phone and I know the ordering because I associate "father" with my father, and that is what counts. Everbody using my phone and my list should ask me beforehand anyway.

    (And for electronic adress-books there is mindless "search".)

  • Frank (unregistered)

    So, they're using Lotus Notes too, huh?

  • boxmonkey (unregistered)

    Holy Crap!

    I may have worked at this company. There's quite a bit of variation to how it was actually done at "my" company, but I don't know how much of that is due to obfuscation...

  • Nevermind (unregistered)

    I was in a meeting yesterday where the DMS people insisted they wanted folders with slashes in them, to reflect the case number. Yes, they wanted a folder called "34/2234/1000" both on the file system and on the web address. Now try to explain to them that a slash is used by the file system...

  • squarelover (unregistered) in reply to WhatTheFaq
    WhatTheFaq:
    Charles M:
    Sadly enough, situations like this are very common in Japan. There is no lexical ordering over the character set so one can't really put things in "alphabetical" order. Instead, someone - usually someone who has worked there forever - owns the filing system and is the only one who can find anything. Offices have shut down when that person leaves.

    Utter rubbish. Dunno why this one keeps popping up, but Japanese does have a freaking "alphabetical" order and offices don't fall apart when workers leave or die.

    Yes, I'll have to agree with WhatTheFaq. Simply because you can't make sense of any lexical order to another language does not mean that there isn't one. Otherwise, libraries and bookstores would be completely useless.

    Lots of rumors abound about how backwards other cultures are, most of them are very much not true. Just perpetuations of someone's ignorant mind.

  • Mark (unregistered) in reply to Nevermind
    Nevermind:
    I was in a meeting yesterday where the DMS people insisted they wanted folders with slashes in them, to reflect the case number. Yes, they wanted a folder called "34/2234/1000" both on the file system and on the web address. Now try to explain to them that a slash is used by the file system...

    WTF?

    I fail to see the problem here. It is trivial to make a document named 34/2234/1000/whatever. (Unless you're on Windows, would they accept 34\2234\1000?) If it's a web interface it's even possible to do so without creating nested subdirectories.

    What's broken here is lack of an escape mechanism in the filesystem. :) Why should the existing nomenclature have to change because of somebody's implementation decision?

  • Cheong (unregistered) in reply to micksam7
    micksam7:
    I'd love to have a whole entire wall of filing cabnets like in the picture.
    That wall of cabinets is common at shops of Chinese herbal medicine, where they named it "???". All staffs at the shop remembers which herbs is stored in which cabinet because there's a well defined indexing system. But apparently it wasn't there at Dave's company...
  • noise (unregistered) in reply to chris
    chris:
    Everyone is obsessed with this bus thing. I'm rich. I go by car.

    Just remember: it's safer standing in the bus, than standing in front of the bus.

  • (cs) in reply to Edowyth
    Edowyth:
    snoofle:
    For example, my sister in law's name starts with "T", but is in my mothers phone book under "D" for daughter-in-law, and my kids names start with "M" and "S", but their cell phones are under "G" (for grandchild) in Grandma's phone book. My name starts with "S" (no, not snoofle), but am under K for "kid".

    I think this is one of the funniest things I've ever heard! At least my mom's phone directory is alphabetized by last name!

    Hmmm looks like the grandmother may have trouble remembering the names of her relatives. I won't be surprised if it's true because that's what happened to my grandparents.

  • (cs) in reply to andywebsdale
    andywebsdale:
    This story really shocked me - can it be true? She should have been cleaning the office, not working there during business hours.
    Naw we wouldn't want her to steal your job.
  • arrastia (unregistered) in reply to Ebs2002

    It´s actually quite efficient job security.

    Let´s face, a worker´s first priority is becoming a critical asset. An employer´s first priority is making its employees expendable. It´s an ages-old battle in which you have to fight with guile and ruthlessness.

    And what better way to become unexpendable than storing in your mind information that is absolutely critical to the operation of the company? You cannot refuse outright to impart that knowledge to your coworkers, but you can be "less than effective" in imparting it while maintaining a helpful and friendly facade.

    Alessa has my respect. You, madam, are a wise woman and have won the battle with your employer. Your job cannot be touched and you have leverage to demand improvements in work conditions and salary with astounding regularity.

    I want to be like her when I grow up.

  • (cs) in reply to arrastia
    arrastia:
    Alessa has my respect. You, madam, are a wise woman and have won the battle with your employer. Your job cannot be touched and you have leverage to demand improvements in work conditions and salary with astounding regularity.
    Only if the company is stupid and/or dysfunctional, and stays that way. The second management realizes what problems this is causing, she has between a week and two months left in the company, depending on how complex the search criteria are that this system is supporting (not very, I suspect) and how skilled the person is who gets the task to replace it with something sane.

    As for improvements in work conditions: she can't take any vacation longer than a day or two, can she? Otherwise, the problem might become apparent to even the most ignorant manager, or she'd have to jeopardize the achieved indispensability by intitating someone else into the Arcane Secrets of Document Managements.

  • The Frinton Mafia (unregistered) in reply to Charles M
    Charles M:
    Sadly enough, situations like this are very common in Japan. There is no lexical ordering over the character set so one can't really put things in "alphabetical" order. Instead, someone - usually someone who has worked there forever - owns the filing system and is the only one who can find anything. Offices have shut down when that person leaves.

    Japan does have alphabetical order. How the heck do you think dictionaries work?? Even if you didn't know Japanese alphabetical order, you could still just search for the name of the file!

    I don't know why there are so many superstitions and general stupidity about that kind of thing.

    On the other hand, even though finding documents presents no more trouble in Japanese than in any other language, I can well believe that the 'document management via magic numbers in my head' system may be awfully common in Japan.

  • dkf (unregistered) in reply to Cheong
    Cheong:
    That wall of cabinets is common at shops of Chinese herbal medicine, where they named it "???".
    Either the WTF website software kungfu'd that word into little pieces, or Chinese is a language that out-WTF!s the whole computer industry.
  • George Nacht (unregistered)

    Maybe I am utterly naive, yes I know I am. But isn´t there some kind of law that prevents or at least punish this kind of pure sabotage-in-broad-day? In my company anyone would have his hands removed for implementing something like that! And then he would have been submitted to exorcism. For start.

  • (cs) in reply to George Nacht
    George Nacht:
    Maybe I am utterly naive, yes I know I am. But isn´t there some kind of law that prevents or at least punish this kind of pure sabotage-in-broad-day? In my company anyone would have his hands removed for implementing something like that!
    There's no law against incompetence.

    Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

    Stuff like this usually happens when you start out with good intentions, lack the competence to do it right the first time and you as well as everyone else is too lazy to fix it, because that would cause a lot of work and problems right now, rather that much more work and problems spread out over months and years.

  • (cs)

    Man how rediculous are those companies who employ whole teams to manage a standard DM software if you can have Alessa 1.0

    Been there. Done that. Bought the T-Shirt.

  • Barry Workman (unregistered)

    This is "the little old lady in tennis shoes" syndrome but with electronic data. The model has been around since there were scrolls maybe even stone tablets. Never ever make one of these people angry unless you have the power to cut their salary or benefits.

  • Cobra Commander (unregistered)

    Sadly enough, this sort of blatant job security posturing is just as prevalent in the government/civil service as in the commercial world. For example...

    Our local information security manager created a policy that all network users had to personally attend his specially tailored and extremely lengthy "network security brief" before being granted access to the local network (please keep in mind the fact that most of our users were relocating between different segments/regions within the same organization which all adhered to the exact same information security policies). He absolutely would not consider any deviation from this policy, and would try to obscure the source of the policy to make it seem that even he didn't have the latitude to break it. It worked... Over time, even his superiors seemed to believe that the policy had descended to earth inscribed in holy stone tablets.

    After a few years, he found a better paying job elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the brief requirement still exists and will probably never go away.

  • (cs) in reply to kirchhoff
    kirchhoff:
    Game. Loved that game, you mean.

    I probably would be saying that if I actually had played them. I haven't had time to play games in a looooong time, even though I own at least 10 consoles and portables (from the Commodore VIC-20 to the Nintendo GameCube & GBA). sigh

  • Zack (unregistered) in reply to AdT

    If he does just be sure to take a picture of it and put the picture on a wooden table before taking a snapshot of it so that we can see the WTF.

    CAPTCHA: Cognac... Hmmm still early, but quite tempting considering my day so far.

  • (cs) in reply to Charles M
    Sadly enough, situations like this are very common in Japan. There is no lexical ordering over the character set so one can't really put things in "alphabetical" order. Instead, someone - usually someone who has worked there forever - owns the filing system and is the only one who can find anything. Offices have shut down when that person leaves.
    from my 3 years of japanese in school, there is a pretty standard way of organizing the hiragana/katakana, so if you convert the first kanji symbol phonetically to either of those alphabets, you'd probably do OK.
  • Pinball (unregistered) in reply to sir_flexalot
    sir_flexalot:
    Sadly enough, situations like this are very common in Japan. There is no lexical ordering over the character set so one can't really put things in "alphabetical" order. Instead, someone - usually someone who has worked there forever - owns the filing system and is the only one who can find anything. Offices have shut down when that person leaves.
    from my 3 years of japanese in school, there is a pretty standard way of organizing the hiragana/katakana, so if you convert the first kanji symbol phonetically to either of those alphabets, you'd probably do OK.

    The real point here is that life would be much simpler if we all just used pig-latin. End of discussion...

    unction-fa ello-ha_orld-wa { alert("ello-Ha orld-Wa!"); }

  • (cs)

    In Document Control don't matter the number sequence the only importance is that the number is unique. That's it, Dave must be one of those guys that said "Why we should make a document, we always has been done this way"

  • (cs)

    has everyone on the planet forgotten about Library Science?

  • whicker (unregistered) in reply to morry
    morry:
    has everyone on the planet forgotten about Library Science?
    Maybe it's because of the perpetuating stereotype of the frowning, ruthless librarians.

    Wait, what? You're going to hire a librarian? That would mean we would all have to talk softly and walk very slowly!

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to sir_flexalot
    sir_flexalot:
    Sadly enough, situations like this are very common in Japan. There is no lexical ordering over the character set so one can't really put things in "alphabetical" order. Instead, someone - usually someone who has worked there forever - owns the filing system and is the only one who can find anything. Offices have shut down when that person leaves.
    from my 3 years of japanese in school, there is a pretty standard way of organizing the hiragana/katakana, so if you convert the first kanji symbol phonetically to either of those alphabets, you'd probably do OK.

    I was going to say something similar, but then I read the whole thread and found that 3 other people had already said it.

  • Worf (unregistered) in reply to andywebsdale
    andywebsdale:
    This story really shocked me - can it be true? She should have been cleaning the office, not working there during business hours.

    I've heard similar stories, but this was normally back in the pre-Win95 days when you had the crappy 8.3 file naming standard. You couldn't touch the .3 part, so you had 8 characters to work with.

    One thoughtful secretary used a numerical system, and stored the filename to purpose mapping in a little steno pad. Havok is wreaked whenever that little pad goes missing.

    At least this WTF uses a database that can be queried...

    (and FYI, this is really just a human filesystem - back when computers were primitive you'd probably do something like this, but when modern filesystems store all sorts of metadata now...).

  • (cs)

    Back when I had a Commodore 64 as a kid, I had nearly a hundred disks that were simply numbered Disk 1, Disk 2, etc. I had memorized what was on every disk, and there wasn't any logical order to them, other than chronological. Eventually I indexed everything, but that was only after I got a PC and wasn't using the C64 as often.

    Summer Games? That would be Disk 1. Arkanoid, you say? Try Disk 22. Caveman Ugh-Lympics? Disk 75.

    Ahh, those were the days.

  • Clark Cox (unregistered) in reply to Charles M
    Charles M:
    Sadly enough, situations like this are very common in Japan. There is no lexical ordering over the character set so one can't really put things in "alphabetical" order.

    Bull. There is indeed a lexical ordering in Japanese.

    Instead, someone - usually someone who has worked there forever - owns the filing system and is the only one who can find anything. Offices have shut down when that person leaves.

    You've been listening to too many urban myths.

  • Steve (unregistered) in reply to AdT

    there's something inherantly funny about immature poo humour. i love it!

    boobies!

  • Binary (unregistered)

    Dump them all in sudo organized folders - let your users do this part.

    Then point a enterprise search engine at the damn thing...

    24 hours later your docs are indexed and searchable from a single interface.

    Profit!

  • smile (unregistered)

    Run the Google Desktop over the lot of it?

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    My mother does filing like this - nothing is ever where you would expect; she puts stuff under what it relates to.

    For example, my sister in law's name starts with "T", but is in my mothers phone book under "D" for daughter-in-law, and my kids names start with "M" and "S", but their cell phones are under "G" (for grandchild) in Grandma's phone book. My name starts with "S" (no, not snoofle), but am under K for "kid".

    My wife saw this and thought it was a wonderful idea.

    Are all women like this, and why? Why? WHY?

    At least this added another level of abstraction. So that when, for example, a person changes its association from B (daughter's boyfriend) to S (son in law) you don't have to change the person's record, only its relationships. This is object oriented design at its finest!

  • dumpless (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    snoofle:
    3. Take a dump of the index table

    Whatever. As long as you don't take a dump on my table...

    ...unless it's a wooden table, you take a picture, print it out...

    captcha: stinky. oh yes!

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