Tales from Working Remotely

My weather widget has been reporting highs in the upper 90s, and the math building is not air conditioned, so I haven't made it a priority to go in. (Many offices have window a/c, but the hallways, classrooms, and most other rooms aren't air conditioned.)

I tried to get something done by email.

Unfortunately, the department head's secretary has more than 300MB worth of stuff in her email, so she is not able to receive mail, and it bounced.

The University spent millions of dollars on the M$ Exchange system that has been plagued with problems. It crashes regularly. It is slow. There is frequent downtime for reasons that befuddle our IT department. If even one person has more than 3000 messages in his inbox, the performance of the whole system goes down. Mail is lost. Problems persist with the spam filtering. On the plus side, it has been so trouble-ridden that the faculty in the Math Department are allowed to keep our departmental email addresses via qmail running on a linux box.

I am becoming seriously tempted to get a gmail address to use for "real work" and sharing it with the people who I want to interact with. I'd then fill up my official email inbox with 300MB of crap so that I wouldn't have to deal with other people.

I suppose, however, that I will have to go in to the office today. Maybe this will be my chance to use the xerox machine.