Sometimes I believe that the people that call the service desk here aren’t “born”, but, instead, created by some dark, cosmic entity that thrives on my torment.

Case in point, we delete files in our workspace area after they’ve been there for longer than 5 days. Keep in mind, these are not user-archived files nor are they files users have in their home directories. They are temporary files related to programs the users are running on the system. Also keep in mind that we have a special area that users can run these programs in that is safe from our “scrubber” for the duration of program execution + 5 days. Plenty of time to get stuff backed up.

*Phone rings*
Me: Hello, Service Center. Jason Speaking*
J.U.: Yeah this is Joe User. My files in workspace are gone.
Me: Yes sir. We cleanup files that are older than 5 days.
J.U.: Do you guys back them up?

*NOTE: Our workspace area on the system he’s talking about is a grand total of 83 TB (that’s TERRA bytes for the uninitiated, a.k.a 83,000GB) that changes by the minute because at any one time, there’s over 30 people logged in to the system and over 100 batch jobs running in the background. It’s like trying to backup /tmp every single time it changes. Also keep in mind that we provide permanent archival storage with no quotas.

Me: No sir. The filesystem is too large and changes too frequently for us to have accurate backups. The workspace area is considered volitile space.
J.U.: Oh man. So my stuff is all gone?
Me: I’m afraid so sir. If you didn’t archive it and it was in your workspace, then, yes. Have you read our user guides and documentation? It’s all outlined in there.
J.U.: Um, no.
Me: Ok, do you know where they’re at on our website.
J.U.: Yes, I got that link.

AAAAARRRRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!

For those not following along, this guy willfully neglected to read the user documentation (yes, it’s dry, boring stuff; but it’s necessary to know this stuff to exist in our environment) and got his stuff nuked because he wasn’t aware of a documented policy.

I’m sure Deskmerc can relate to all of this. He’s got it a bit worse with the gang he has to support, but I definitly feel his pain!