How do I delete?
How do I delete?
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Long. I can’t write short things. TL;DR at the bottom.
This story takes place many years ago when I was but a young biologist, freshly hired by a college, and just beginning to learn to code properly. Since I wanted to use some of the tools that are now generally called big data methods and I didn’t want to be stuck as a script kiddie for the rest of my career I was making friends in the computer science department (henceforth CS). The other players in this story are three CS professors who I knew by reputation but not much else. They will be named for their defining characteristics in the manner of the seven dwarfs. First, there is Shady. He’s the sort of person who would spend six hours trying to figure out how to get out of one hour of work. He once put “Had to use the bathroom – back soon!” on his office door for three days to avoid talking to students. Has strong opinions about onions. Second, there’s Boring. Boring could tell you a story about bears fighting with lightsabers from the back of cybernetically enhanced dinosaurs and you’d fall asleep. Third, and finally, there is Friendly. Super nice guy. If you so much as bother to show him basic human decency he’ll be in your corner forever. Since this is academia that’s not a lot of corners he has to be in.
I walk past Shady’s office. The door is standing open and Friendly and Boring are standing on each side of Shady as if posing for a painting. Shady and Friendly are talking animatedly, and Boring appears to be practicing the art of stillness. Shady waves me over. “Is there a faculty meeting today?” he asks.
“Is it the first Thursday of the month?” I ask. Since time immemorial the faculty meetings have always been the first Thursday of every month.
Shady takes this as a real question. Fair. I’m notoriously calendar-challenged. “No,” he says, and then waits for the next question. I point out that this means that there is no faculty meeting.
“But he has a calendar reminder for it!” Friendly says. “So do I!” Boring helpfully weighs in on this conversation by leaning one degree to the left and saying nothing at all.
“Oh, right,” I say. The issue is simple: the year before the person responsible for setting the meeting on the calendar somehow made them recurring but locked them to dates and not days. This year that makes all those meeting times wrong. That position has also changed hands and, because this was in a Dark Age of IT for the college, the new person didn’t have access to change recurring meetings from the previous person in her position. So we had incorrect meetings floating around on the calendar, all tagged to the previous person (who, what the heck, will be Snow White). I give Shady, Friendly, and Boring the run-down.
Shady nods sagely. He would cut his own throat to escape a meeting so this is welcome news. Then he says, “How do I remove this from my calendar?”
I am momentarily stunned into silence. Before I can compose myself Friendly says, “We were all looking at this when you came by and we can’t figure it out.” Boring blinks, which is probably him agreeing.
I remember deleting the entire series of wrongly-placed meetings, but asking me how I did it is like asking what muscles, in what order, I use to raise my coffee cup to my lips. I don’t remember this being difficult, but three people with PhDs in computer science apparently haven’t managed it. Did I accidentally call upon ancient powers undreamt of by mortals to release the surly bonds that tied those meetings to my calendar?
I reach for the old stand-bys. “Have you tried… right-clicking on the meeting?” Shady clicks, a twitching motion like a snake striking a rat. The trio gasps. Several of the items in the list have the word “delete” in them!
Friendly takes over, leaning across the desk and making a serious face. “It says we can delete just the meeting or the entire series. Which should we do?” Shady is frozen, possibly because his brain has been overloaded by the possibility of simply deleting a meeting.
“Uh… probably the series. The whole thing is wrong and we have the new meetings set up properly on the calendar.”
Friendly looks like a man ready to close an important business deal. “Are you sure?” he asks, with way more intensity than the decision requires.
“That’s what I did,” I say, taking the path of not actually advising anything. I have visions of Shady deleting every meeting request he ever gets and me being blamed for it.
Shady clicks on the menu. His eyes narrow. “It’s asking whether we want to email the person who set up the meeting to tell them we declined!” His voice has the natural panic of a man who has spent his entire life dodging responsibility who has just discovered that he’s about to be audited. “Should we?”
Even Boring makes eye contact this time. I sigh. “Who set up that meeting?”
“Snow White,” Friendly replies.
“Right,” I say. “And where is she now?”
Shady momentarily panics, as if he thinks he’s been questioned about a disappearance by the police. I answer myself to avert further weirdness. “Gone. At another job. So what does it matter?”
Shady isn’t so sure. This sounds like he might be ratting himself out. “But what happens when she gets the message that we canceled the meeting?”
“Her email is disconnected. She won’t get the message.”
Shady is confused. I spend five minutes explaining how email is not magic, and does not actually find a person, merely an address on the network, and that this address is now a boarded-up building. (Shady teaches a class called “Introduction to Networking”.) Shady is confused. “If you left this job would you check the email for this job?” I finally say.
“No!” Shady exclaims. “I don’t even check this email on the weekends!”
“I hear you didn’t check your email for three months this summer,” I respond.
Boring bursts out laughing. Shady clicks “Don’t Send”.
And this is the story of how I figured out where the dead weight was in the CS department.
TL;DR. Three professors of computer science cannot delete a meeting off an Outlook calendar.## TLDR Summary:
The issue is simple: the year before the person responsible for setting the meeting on the calendar somehow made them recurring but locked them to dates and not days. TL;DR. Three professors of computer science cannot delete a meeting off an Outlook calendar. The whole thing is wrong and we have the new meetings set up properly on the calendar.”
Friendly looks like a man ready to close an important business deal. So we had incorrect meetings floating around on the calendar, all tagged to the previous person (who, what the heck, will be Snow White). “I don’t even check this email on the weekends!”
“I hear you didn’t check your email for three months this summer,” I respond. “It says we can delete just the meeting or the entire series. “But what happens when she gets the message that we canceled the meeting?”