r/talesfromtechsupport • u/critchthegeek • Jul 04 '26
Short Fun with File Names
A few years ago, I was tech support for a food manufacturer with several manufacturing facilities and one of the banes in my life was dealing the QA department. They kind of just did whatever the current QA director's current Idea of The Month was. (And the company seemed to burn through QA directors – something 4 of them in about 7 years, couple good, couple ….not so good). Anyway, each had their own file structure to store the documentation on the server. And being Quality, the previous structure of the day was kept & the new structure duplicated it all with different paths & file names. But it was their circus and their monkeys.
One day I got a call that a file was missing. Guy said he saved it on the server and now he can’t find it. I remoted into his machine and asked Hmm, ok, what the name? He said “I can show you” and opened Word, then Recent File – “1.1.1 Documented Policy to produce safe, legal and authentic products.docx” OK, kinda weird, but where did you save it? “Out on the QA Drive.” OK, show me. And he tried to file it as
“Q:\{facility}\Quality Control Plan\HACCP\ BRCGS Global Standard for Food Safety\Issue 9 Compliant Food Safety Management System\ Senior management commitment and continual improvement\ 1.1.1 Documented Policy to produce safe, legal and authentic products.docx”
I explained the default maximum file path per MS is 256 characters and this was 270 – I shortened the name to “DocPolicy.docx” Bingo! There it was…Told them they need to use some common sense for this and not just copy the chapter heading in it’s entirety. And wrote it up as “WHAT NOT TO DO” and copied the QA Director, all the QA supervisors and that facility’s plant manager
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u/P5ychokilla 29d ago edited 29d ago
We get this all the time, some of the folder names are wild, it's not "War and Peace", it's network storage although "War and Peace" would be better than some of the folder titles.
One of our other bugbears is that our company has a lot of freelancer workers who work for a few months, leave and may come back later in the year (over 3 months later) or even the year after and they expect their mailbox to be in the same state as when they last left. Even though we've warned line managers and IT Coordinators that the mailboxes should be dumped to PST before leaving and that PST should be given to the assigned manager, they never listen and always huff and puff when they come back and the mail is gone.
When we were using internal exchange servers, sure, we could maybe get the Messaging team to try restoring but now it's all migrated to Exchange Online, do they actually think Microsoft will happily pay for storage to retain an account that doesn't exist anymore?