Changing email addresses was too difficult for IT.
~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2019-06-13 |
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| There are a lot of good people in Adobe's IT. I know quite a few of them. But overworked people and bad policies, can be indistinguishable from incompetent people. |
I was changing roles in my company, and my old role was highly visible and got 100's of emails a week -- my new role was unrelated, and I didn't want to be harassed by that old stuff, and focus on my new role.
So I asked IT can you create a new email address so that I can leave the old one as an OOO (Out of the Office message) to tell people where to go for support on their old problems? My little stroke of brilliance was going to help many people get information they needed, and get out from under being harassed for an old role.
Should be easy, right?
I put in the request 2 weeks before the job change:
- They said they could do that, but only by changing my entire identity. I griped saying I really only wanted a different email, but if that's the only way to do it, I was fine. (In prior years, I had gotten aliases and custom emails -- but new policies prevented competence, and demanded doing it the hard way).
- So they were about to do it and they emailed me all the things that were going to break by doing this. I mentioned thanks and would take them on... but I re-iterated that I really had just wanted a new email address (and re-explained what I was trying to do). They claimed, "oh, that's doable"... So they cancelled the order, and asked me to talk to the communcations group in IT.
- The Coms group said that I can't just add an email address, so sent me back to the first group, which had cancelled my order.
- So I asked them again could they please put me back in the queue...
- Many days later, instead of creating a new ID, they copied my old ID to my new one, and instead of leaving on the OOO message that I had set, they set the old email address as a forwarder to the new one. So not only didn't I get a clean email (I had 80,000 emails that I had to clean up manually to start fresh), it was also still getting all the old roles emails, and those people weren't getting messages on where to go for support.
- I asked them to fix the OOO message on the old account and re-explained why.
- They said fine, it was fixed.
- It wasn't fixed. What they had done is turned on OOO message on the new account, and since the old account was forwarded, they would get the OOO message (as would all the new people). But I had no usable email.
- I asked them to fix it again, and again laid out what I was asking and why. And asked them to PLEASE read the original text. I need an OOO message on the old account, not the new account. The old account should not be a forwarder. Just let me do my new job with a new email account. Please.
- They said that I should have asked for that in the first place.
- I pointed out that I had, and copied the original text, and asked them to point out anything incorrect in the original few attemts. They deferred from finding a mistake... but assured me that this time they had fixed it.
- What they had done is delete the old email completely, so now it just threw an error (there was no person in Adobe with the old email address).
- I asked them to please fix it.
- Finally, I got the old email as an OOO working, and the new email kinda working....
- Then after 4 weeks they deleted the old email -- because of some obscure policy that they couldn't leave it on for more than that. (And they had never bothered to tell me). Bringing down the original shitstorm of requests to my new email, asking me to help them in my old role, and why my email had changed.
- I asked them to turn back on the OOO message and the old account, but that was beyond their technical/policy capacity.
- Then a couple months later, I had a different problem on my new email... IT helped me by restoring the 80,000 emails from the old account to the new account (which I had never asked for, and I had previously deleted). Since it was hard to delete them all -- I now can't find anything in the new account, because ever search pulls in things from 2008.
Sometimes this is what #AdobeLife is. Well meaning people that are superficially helpful, but too stressed/overworked to read a fucking email, and with systems in place that won't allow them to the most basic things like fix an email address. Most of the peopel are good people, and I liked my job -- but the technical incompetence was often painful.
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Tags: Adobe
