The Great Purge

Inspired by a message from my corporate technology department.

Next GroupWise purge: Saturday, October 20th, 2007

On October 20th, 2007, we will purge all GroupWise accounts of non-archived mail dating from prior to October 19th, 2007.

We realize that the inability to store messages for more than 24 hours may cause some minor inconvenience to employees. To minimize the impact of this new policy, please follow these steps:

- Delete all messages as soon as you have read them (the existing Read/Unread functionality is redundant, and will be deprecated.)

- If you think you may need particular details at a later date, please commit them to memory, or write them down in a three-ring binder. But please purge the pages from your binder at least once a week, as binder space is expensive. NOTE: Information Technology is investigating an upgrade to 3″ binders, but these may not work with all applications and are not supported.

- If you intend to be on vacation or sick for more than 24 hours, please set up an auto-delete rule on your GroupWise account. A simple automated reply message should be created, such as: “I’m sorry, I’m not around to receive your e-mail right now, and have deleted it. Please try again when you know I’m at my desk.”

- Employees are encouraged to subscribe to a free Gmail account, where storage space is somehow almost unlimited. According to their website, such accounts have “Over 2910.863667 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message”. We originally believed this counter was in fact counting down the diminishing amount of space, as ours does, but was not the case. We suspect witchcraft.

- Pay careful attention to the size of attachments, particularly audio, video, text or data files, which are often reasonably large. Do not send such files as e-mail attachments. Burn them to a CD or DVD, and put them in the internal mail. Or harness the power of the internet by placing them on a file-sharing system like BitTorrent so they can be accessed without undue strain on our capacity.

- Pay careful attention to the word count on messages you send. Where possible, use emoticons to convey context without using undue characters. Text message abbreviations and short grunts are often sufficient.

- To ensure efficient use of our finite resources, all libraries and archives will adopt a similar purge policy beginning immediately. If you subscribe to a periodical, a new issue will not be released until the previous one has put in the recycle bin and the bin has been emptied. Television programs are requested to reduce the number of shows they produce, as archive shelf space is limited.

The Access to Information law:

Each employee has the duty to safeguard in an appropriate manner business records that he/she creates or receives from an external source:

- Please delete all messages of a non-essential or essential nature. If possible, please avoid sending them in the first place. Work-related conversations must be plausibly deniable. If you must communicate with another employee, ensure nobody is watching.

- To understand how to distinguish business records from transitory records, please apply our new “year zero” filing criteria:

Did it happen prior to September 1, 2007? If the answer is “no”, the information is transitory. If you believe the answer is “yes”, you are simply incorrect.

Once again, thank you all for doing your part to reduce the load on the GroupWise system. This internet thing can’t keep growing forever.

Please delete this message.

Too slow. I’ll retract it. You didn’t see me….

Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 10-10-2007 | 09:10 AM
Posted in: CBC | Teh Internets