Tonight I'm packing up the personal stuff in my office, and have been scrubbing personal effects from the computers I've been using for the past year+. Tomorrow I leave this job behind. Along the way I'd written a number of scripts that were for my personal use, but which remain my soon-to-be-former employer's property, and so will be left behind.

There is one script in particular that I shall miss.

This particular script is about three pages long, and is rather mediocre Perl, but it got the job done. The script would get fired off once a day in the early hours of the morning. Using OLE, it would first log into Outlook; find my Inbox; and inventory it, noting time stamps, and whether a message had been read or not. Then it would use OLE again to create an Excel spreadsheet, which it would populate with a summary of the inventory. Finally, it would reach out and massage Excel, causing Excel to create a bar chart.

This chart showed the amount of unprocessed email in my Inbox for each week I'd been on the job, including any email that I had never gotten to. (My habit is to move a message into a separate folder once I've dealt with it.) I could stand back, look at the chart, and see quarterly cycles. (The flow of email picks up towards the end of quarters, as Sales tries to co-opt Development into the Sales force to close deals.) I could also point to the blips on the chart where various hiccups happened (e.g., "Sales sold them WHAT?"). The graph rises steadily over the course of the last year, showing an ever-increasing pile of unprocessed (and some unread) email. The mail flows on, and on, and on. Some weeks I could dig through most of it, but those weeks have been fewer and farther between. The overall effect is depressing. The specifics of the mail flow are particular to this company, but the gurgling sounds of people drowning under their email piles can be heard from many companies.

I will miss this script. But I won't miss the reason for it.

In reply to On Leaving a Script Behind by dws

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