File folder aggravation

grampa's grumpy on a Monday....

You forgot

"GET OFF MY LAWN!"

I love being a surveyor - we all get so grumpy about things like this ????

Grumpy.....good!

When I was a state employee all the surveyors there were required to archive our data files on the mainframe.?ÿ And as you can imagine?ÿpeople in?ÿother departments were?ÿalways getting in there an mucking up everything.?ÿ Usually it was the folks in the design department screwing with the .dgn and .asc files.

There were plenty of files in there?ÿwith weird extensions like all our Ashtech data.?ÿ I noticed if the perps didn't recognize the file extension, or couldn't open it, they left it alone.?ÿ I devised a code to rename our files by simply shifting the letters in the file extension one letter back, or possibly forward.?ÿ A .dgn file was renamed ".cfm"?ÿ or an ascii file renamed as ".btd".?ÿ It was easy enough in those days to rename the archived file back to its proper name after you grabbed it off the mainframe.?ÿ

Our aerial branch would?ÿcreate these huge Intergraph (dgn) files of nothing but miles of contours on their clipper machines.?ÿ The bridge division was always monkeying around with them looking at the hydraulic data.?ÿ No one minded but they had a propensity to screw with them and save them back on the mainframe.?ÿ I renamed?ÿthe contour dgns to have a file extension of ".sff"...surface feature file.?ÿ All they were was .dgn files, but nobody ever figured it out.?ÿ They finally started asking us for the info.?ÿ It was easy enough to grab the file and rename it before delivering it to them.?ÿ And?ÿthey kept their skinners away from our archived files.

Almost as bad (and maybe worse, for that matter) is when software messes with things that it absolutely should not.

Just recently I had prepared a preliminary R/W .dgn file for the designers, and for some totally unknown reason- when one designer would open up the file it would force a re-stationing on one of the alignments! So, I recreated the file and made it read-only. Problem solved until someone got in there and unset the read-only attribute. GRRRRR. Only one machine did this... go figure.

Another time the same software went noodles in another designer's PC RAM and totally "Greeked" their TIME SHEETS which use an entirely different program, of course. Closed the offending CADD software and the time sheet printed just fine.

We decided to go full-bore into paperless filing. Because of that and adding a server some file paths needed to change, three years later and I'm finally to the point I can navigate around it all without much searching.

It's best to set it all up once and stick to it, change is a bad thing.?ÿ

Data/File management is key to a successful business which involves disciplines that share data.?ÿ If everyone is doing their own thing or not abiding by the rules management needs to take control.?ÿ There must be a protocol and it must be followed.?ÿ One part of ours is "Only surveyors make changes to the survey files and only engineers make changes to the engineer files".?ÿ It really works quite nicely when everyone is on the same page.