!!!!!!!!!!My Files Are Soooo Much Bigger Than Yours!!!

Like many offices, mine was a realm of those who have rejected corporate values by yielding to nasty emails or violent outbursts, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their IT department. You know, the usual stuff. But one day my coworker, who we’ll call Virgil, came to me with a very simple problem.

Virgil: “[My Name], can you show me a faster way to find the file I’m looking for in the shared drive?”

Me: “Sure thing, Virgil! Check this out. Aside from sorting everything by name, you can also start typing the name of the file you’re looking for, and it will automatically select it.”

Virgil: “Wow, that’s great! Thank you!”

But little did I realize the events I had set in motion…

A few days later, there came a rumbling from deep within the bowels of the office: “[MY NAME], GET IN HERE.”

Crap.

Boss: “I hear you showed Virgil a fast way to find his files.”

Me: “You mean the typing thing? Yeah, super handy, isn’t it?”

Boss: “Show me.”

I typed a bit of a filename.

Me: “Handy, right?”

Boss: “That’s too complicated! Show me something easier so I can access my file faster! I want it at the top of the list!”

Me: “Well, uh, sometimes I’ll put an exclamation mark at the front of a readme so it shows up at the top of the list. As long as you only need one file there, it’s pretty handy.”

Boss: “Do it.”

Me: “You… want me to? Okay…”

And so I did. [Boss] was happy that her file was at the top of the list. And all was well, for about three days…

Virgil: “[My Name], help! I can’t find the file I need by typing anymore!”

Me: “Oh, no, what happened?”

Virgil: “Everyone’s started putting exclamation marks at the beginning of their filenames so they’re at the top of the list! Look, this one’s got five in front and three at the back! D*** it, Carol just added another one to hers, and I dropped six places!”

Me: “Excuse me, I need to go cry in the restroom.”

The exclamation marks spread across the shared drive like locusts through a wheat field. There was no stopping them until some paths ended up exceeding the 255-character limit and even then, it only stemmed the tide. The eventual “solution” was that only my boss was allowed to use exclamation marks outside of her own folder, but there was no victory that day. I don’t know what that company’s folder structure looks like now, but I suspect my life is better for that fact.