Re: Microsoft Lookout

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From: Luke A. Kanies
Subject: Re: Microsoft Lookout
Date: 15:57 on 19 May 2004
On Wed, 19 May 2004, David Cantrell wrote:

> No, I viewed it.  With my eyes.  If viewing the message in one type of
> window makes stuff behave differently to viewing it in another, that is
> just another thing to Hate.

One of my clients uses some kind of retarded emailed time tracking 
application -- definitely something you could only code in the incestuous 
MS world.  They email you a document (or an app? I'm not even sure) as an 
attachment every week, and you open it, fill it out, and submit it.

The catch is that you can't click on the little paper clip in the corner 
of Lookout; you have to double click the email to open it, and then you 
have to double click the attachment to open it.  No, you can't save the 
attachment to disk.  If you do anything else, it will look exactly like 
it's working fine, except that your attempt to submit will result in an 
email saying that your attempt failed.  Now you have to retype everything, 
because there's no state.

And, of course, once you've successfully submitted the document, it's now 
stored in some central (probably MSAccess) database, so you can't modify 
it; you have to request a new timesheet (and once you've requested it you 
don't get notified that the request was accepted, you just start getting 
emails warning you that your timesheet is late) and retype everything. 
But no, you don't get to look at what you typed before; you have to have 
it all stored elsewhere.

I haven't bothered to submit that one before because 1) WTF do we expect 
from crap like that? and 2) I'm not sure that actually qualifies as 
software.  It's scarily stupid, though, and even though everyone at the 
company knows how stupid it is, the email you get with your timesheet 
doesn't mention any of the idiocy, so first-time users never get their 
timesheets to work.

*shudder*

-- 
If smiling uses so fewer muscles than frowning, how come it 
hurts my face so much?
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Luke Kanies | http://abstractive.org | http://reductiveconsulting.com
There's stuff above here

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