Not all managers are afraid of technology. However, there are some I'd like to see exercise a little more restraint before they click that button. There's nothing like a senior manager saying, "..but I just...", to get my nervous tic going.

On an otherwise quiet day, the Vice President's secretary called my boss about a problem with the VP's mail. My boss dashed out of his office, banked off the walls of two cubicles to round the corner, and slid to a stop behind me, not-so-gently nudging my chair into the desk. Panting from the exertion, he gasped something about the server deleting the VP's mail before he keeled over.

I located the VP's mailfile. No one wanted to be the one to tell the VP anything, he had a scant 60MB of mail, still on the server. I told my boss the problem was at the desktop, not the server, and Wally should take care of it. My boss' eye started to twitch. The VP's secretary had explicitly directed that Wally not be sent. It seemed he had a long history of not fixing things. Instead, Dilbert and I were chosen to exorcise the mail demons from the VP's desktop.

The VP had three offices on site, each with a desktop computer, plus a laptop. Apparently, all four machines had the same problem. The VP would open his mail, then, a minute or two after he started reading, messages would vanish. Dilbert and I were escorted to the VP's office and lair of the VP's secretary by our boss. The VP's secretary ushered us into the inner sanctum and pointed out the computer, discretely nestled behind the football field-size desk. Dilbert turned the computer on as our boss hovered nearby. The VP's secretary logged into the network and Notes as the VP so we could see the problem for ourselves.

Dilbert opened Notes. He scrolled through the Inbox and, just as he started to check the number of messages, the screen refreshed and some messages vanished. I compared the new count with what I'd seen on the server. There was a one or two message difference. I shooed Dilbert out of the chair and opened the VP's address book.

When I opened the Replication tab, the problem was obvious. The VP had enabled scheduled replication to the desktop -- on all four machines. If he hadn't opened mail at a given machine for a few hours, or days, he might see messages he had already deleted from another replica. Then, just as he got ready to read them for the second time, the local replica would update and the deleted messages would vanish. We disabled replication on the machine we were at. Then we told our boss that Wally needed to disable replication on the VP's three other machines.

As Dilbert and I started back to our desks, we heard the VP's secretary saying how her boss would come out of his office chortling about some new feature he'd found on his computer. He'd spend hours explaining it to her. Then, it seemed, he would forget all about what he'd done. Dilbert and I cringed, concerned about what the VP might do next.

DominoPower Contributing Editor Nancy Hand is primary Notes admin at a remote site for a large corporation. She earned both Novell and Microsoft certifications in network engineering before being introduced to Lotus Notes. The 3,000 users she supports constantly challenge Nancy to keep up with their creative missteps. With a background in art, she brings a different perspective to working with computers and their users. In the past, Nancy has worked in the fields of accounting, criminal justice, and museum display. To balance the challenges of the job, she continues to draw and sculpt between stabs at writing novels and designing knitware.