Something That Sucks More Than a Cheap Whore

Posted at 8:28 PM, Thursday, December 15, 2005

Today, I got really really pissed off at work, and although I've mentioned the cause in the forums previously, I decided the pain and suffering placed upon me warranted a full blog entry.

You remember that scene from Office Space, where the colleagues all release their frustrations caused by the office printer?  The bit where they stole it from the office, took it out into a field and then took turns to beat it to an electronic death with a baseball bat?  Well, I'm getting close to doing something remarkably similar, except I have a slight problem.  My frustration of choice is software related instead of hardware related, meaning that no matter how much I want to batter the crap out the computer, the software still gets to live on in another hard drive somewhere.  So, which piece of software is causing me such tension and grief?  Well surprisingly, it's not Microsoft related...yes, yes, I know, if I were a gambling man, I'd have lost some money too.  No, instead the accolade belongs to IBM.

If you haven't guessed yet, I'm talking about that abomination of an email client...Lotus Notes.

From completely non-standard function keys to entirely cryptic messages to random (and frequent) crashes to insanely lengthy start-up times, I'm often left wondering just how this utter abortion of a software program could manage to establish something called a 'market share'.

On Your Marks, Get Set, Zzzzz...

Now granted, colleagues have claimed to be able to start up Lotus Notes in as little as thirty seconds.  I, however, have only ever been witness to the breathtaking speed of a little under three and a half minutes, and that was just the once, and probably because I got lucky; normally I have to wait at least five minutes, and it has taken up to ten minutes before.

You Have Mail (Allegedly)

Then there's the little thing that is supposed to tell me when I have mail.  Normally, a popup window appears by default, but it's really annoying when you're typing away while reading scribbled notes from a piece of paper, only to look up and find that the little popup has interrupted things, and so most of what you've just typed has been conveniently ignored.  So I switched off the popup and opted instead for an audible alarm which appears to be hit and miss at best.  I get three emails and one audible ping.  Fair enough, so I go and read my emails.  Then, a couple of minutes later, another ping, so I check my emails and...no new email.  Hmmm.  Back to work, when a few more minutes later and...ping.  I find that I've been lied to once again.

You Have Errors

And then there's the cute little error messages that helpfully articulate exactly what has gone wrong...

Object variable not set
Ah...the Lotus Notes development team assuming that all Notes users are software developers.

 

Error, the form and subform DelOptionsSubform both have a field entitled ReturnReceipt
WTF?  This could have been written in Ubykh...at least it would have made more sense.

I Crashed Earlier, Please Reboot

When Notes crashes (note lack of the word 'if'), you cannot simply close the program and restart it, for that would make things too easy.  No, instead you have to reboot your computer.  Thankfully, IBM came to the rescue and created a purpose-built program called KillNotes, demonstrating that rather than fixing the root problem, they decided to stick an electronic Band-Aid on instead.

Conclusion
Lotus Notes sucks, and I'm off to watch Office Space again...