1

Well I finally had the ‘perfect user’ today. We recently did a PDQ upgrade to MS-Office on all our PC’s and I just had someone come to me and ask why we emptied his Deleted Items folder! I asked why it mattered and he admitted to my face that he was using it to store important emails!

And yes, I pointed to the trash can on my floor and asked him if he also stored papers in that. He said no. He got the point but somehow did not seem amused.

It was an otherwise terrible day of “My Outlook doesn’t work now!” and “Why can’t I open my Word documents that used to be ‘right here’…?”, but that gem just kept me smiling through it all.

Anyone else ever met this particular Unicorn in real life?

35 Spice ups
2

Not come across someone as silly as that, but I like …’

Them: What’s a desktop shortcut?

Them: I’m not computer literate

Them: The Internet is down

Me: No, your Username is not your password

Me: No I don’t know your Internet banking details

Me: No I can’t remember what I did to your PC 3 weeks ago

Me: No I can’t remember your (unique, system generated, not related to your name) login name

Them: I know about computers I can fix it …

Me: … OK, just ipconfig/renew it & you’ll be OK

Them: ip what?

2 Spice ups
3

I’ve had quite a few occasions where a user was storing important emails inside Deleted Items once I even found a complete folder structure .

Once I told them about the retention policy in O365 they moved everything their inbox .

4 Spice ups
4

Still, that’s what you will get when you do changes without letting staff know though.

5 Spice ups
5

I’ve seen this before.

I tell people be warned I will reboot your system as I see fit and I will empty your trash when I see fit as well.

I will not care one bit about unsaved documents when I reboot either, it will never cross my mind that some idiot didn’t save their work after every major change.

3 Spice ups
6

I know a guy, not that computer savvy, who went to help his girlfriend because her email was slow.

He saw over 2500 emails in her deleted items folder, right clicked, and emptied it.

Pretty sure I heard the scream from across town.

5 Spice ups
7

Seen that a few times. Worst one was a guy who had his secretary read his email, and she’d move them to deleted items (not actually delete them) to signify to him that she had read them.

His laptop PC came in to the department for something or other and when we shut his outlook down we clicked the “yes” to clear the delete items prompt, as it was comapny policy to keep it empty. He wasn’t amused! We were :smiley:

4 Spice ups
8

yea, had a real nightmare of a user trying to remote in, and Outlook not responsive at all, got her to take laptop to office, so I could remote to it and have a peek …

found her Recycle bin, not only full of mails, but they were set out all neat like - Finance - HR - Sales etc, and in each file there were sub files for each manager …

plus I then found her .pst was coming up for 5GB :o(

short version, took all her bin files, and archived them, cleaned the remaining mails to remove all the ones from the Co asking who had left their lights on, that sort of stuff, ran and saved a new .pst - now at a reasonable 1.2 ish GB - and whilst on there did a quick clean up - page files and a manual shortened version of CCleaner too, once done that thing FLEW, well compared to the paperweight it had been a couple of hours earlier :o)

ps

never DID find out where tf she used to put any ,ail that WAS considered fit to remove … as there wasn’t a recycle bin folder in her recycle bin :o)

1 Spice up
9

Once at Geek Squad I had a gentleman come in who was storing all of his… recreational viewing… material in his recycle bin. He couldn’t figure out why his hard drive was full…

3 Spice ups
10

I still have users in my environment that will use the deleted items for their important job bids and scream bloody murder when they’re gone.

11

I see that all the time where I work. I constantly use the analogy of “if you put an item in your trash can at home, are you expecting to dig it back out and keep it a week, 2 months, a year later?”. Most of our users understand the purpose of the deleted items folder but still choose to use it as a secondary inbox or (CYA folder as our users call it). It’s quite frustrating and management is just as guilty of this practice so getting them to back us is never going to happen. It’s fine now though, we have O365 and have quotas set so when users reach that and stop receiving mail we will simply tell them it’s Microsoft imposing the limit. Nothing we can do, DELETE YOUR CRAP. :slight_smile:

1 Spice up
12

Going this something like this now. I even changed the name from ‘Outlook 2016’ to ‘Outlook Use this one’ on the public desktop. Still get a call in the morning saying My outlook is missing what did you do?!?!? Oh well, at least i have job security.

13

Can they not create a sub folder in the Inbox called ‘CYA’ I won’t even ask about creating a rule in OL to put certain items in the CYA folder…

1 Spice up
14

Most users have sub folders in their inbox but their argument to keeping items in the deleted items folder is why create a folder when one already exists (referring to the deleted items folder)? FACE 2 DESK Rules are a curse… I’ve had a few users reach a limit in Outlook on the number of rules they have. We’d prefer they didn’t even know about rules. When I tell our users that I empty my deleted every day when I close Outlook I typically get the wide-eyed deer in the headlights look.

2 Spice ups
15

We had a couple users come forward with that same revelation when the delete deleted items rule went into effect, they were forewarned.

16

I think a lot of users think the deleted items doesn’t count towards their mailbox limit, so put stuff in there thinking they can store more than they’re “allowed”

1 Spice up
17

I had literally the EXACT same thing happen at my last gig. The only difference - it was the CEO. He called me and said he couldn’t open an Excel sheet because he didn’t have enough storage space blah blah blah. I came over, replicated the issue then proceeded to check out his recycle bin. Full of porn. Probably at least 100gb’s of it, maybe more. There were some documents and other junk but it was pretty clear where the space went.

1 Spice up
18

We have at least one user that opens all her new email and leaves each open until she’s replied AND the thread is finished. I have seen at least 30+ emails open on her desktop at once…just…why…WHY???

I’m going back under my desk where it’s safe

2 Spice ups
19

I’m not sure which situation was more awkward. The extra awkward to my situation comes from the fact that the gentleman was mid to late 30’s, his parents were with him, and he was desperate to make sure that they didn’t find out. Still, CEO…

1 Spice up
20

I have seen it, I explain to them that it needs to be emptied each time they close Outlook but they keep answering No to the message - I cannot understand the logic of “storing” stuff in Deleted Items but then… Users.