11mo ago

Kelly Rowland cannot escape questions about texting Nelly via Excel

www.avclub.com Kelly Rowland cannot escape questions about texting Nelly via Excel

Please stop asking Kelly Rowland about the "Dilemma" music video

21 comments

I’m familiar with a multibillion dollar international corporation that uses an excel spreadsheet to communicate between divisions.
Not email or slack or teams or the telephone. An excel spreadsheet.
The left column is where one division enters a message, and the right column is where the other division responds. For a new message, you start a new row. The file lives on a network drive.
- But… why?
  
  Because that's the way they've done it since 1987, and the CEO doesn't like change.
  
  Not OP, but if I had to hazard a guess, it started as a rudimentary issue tracker and grew into a formalized system over time, maybe? I've worked with many a project manager who "knew Excel" and liked to use it for things it should never be used for, and sometimes PMs get promoted and take their dumb little systems up the org chart with them.
  
  Bypassing communication archiving requirements? Years ago, I worked for a company that logged all IM, etc, that occurred in a companies intranet. There were laws that required all communications to be preserved for certain industries.
  This sounds like a workaround to avoid chat history
  
  I genuinely don’t know. I was as flabbergasted as you are.
- It's like a wiki from the 80s!
- I used to see this a lot when a team had to engage with an external vendor temporarily (or not so temporarily), but the only approved software both companies shared was Office before Teams was ubiquitous.
  In the worst case, the file wasn't able to be shared live (e.g., SharePoint), so it was just going back and forth in email attachments. That was just as much of a nightmare as you'd guess.
  
  So they were sending emails with a file attachment containing... messages? =⁠_⁠= How about using the emails themselves to, you know... type the message?
  wtaf
  
  That sounds just awful. At least this one is on a network share.
- Delete it.
  
  Oh good god. I mean I just am aware that this is how this company communicates, but I can imagine the fallout if it was deleted.

Since it's not mentioned in the article: the device is a Nokia 9200 series Communicator. Had a perfectly functional SMS app for its era, of course.
Nokia Communicators were absolutely rad. Had a 9110 and it was incredible.

That article is so annoying to read

She should be held accountable! Why! Why, I ask!

21 comments