Pexels/Reddit

Workplace systems only work when people use them properly.

The following story is about a man who worked in tech support and was called to find a missing file on the server.

He discovered that the QA employee had saved it using an extremely long and complicated file path.

As he investigated, he realized the issue wasn’t the system but how the file was named.

Read the story below for some good techie laughs.

Fun with File Names

A few years ago, I was tech support for a food manufacturer with several manufacturing facilities.

One of the banes in my life was dealing with the QA department.

They kind of just did whatever the current QA director’s idea of the month was.

The company seemed to burn through QA directors.

There were something like four of them in about seven years.

A couple were good, others were not so good.

This employee thought the new structure was messy.

Anyway, each had their own file structure to store the documentation on the server.

Being Quality, the previous structure of the day was kept.

The new structure duplicated it all with different paths and file names.

But it was their circus and their monkeys.

He received a call, saying a file was missing.

One day, I got a call that a file was missing.

The guy said he saved it on the server and now he couldn’t find it.

I remoted into his machine. I asked what the name was.

He said, “I can show you.” He opened Word. Then, he went to Recent Files.

He showed “1.1.1 Documented Policy to produce safe, legal and authentic products.docx.”

I said okay, that’s kind of weird. I asked where he saved it. He said, “Out on the QA drive.”

He saw the file had a very long path.

I asked him to show me. He tried to file it as a very long path.

“Q:{facility}\Quality Control Plan\HACCP\BRCGS Global Standard for Food Safety\Issue 9 Compliant Food Safety Management System\Senior management commitment and continual improvement\1.1.1 Documented Policy to produce safe, legal and authentic products.docx.”

I explained that the default maximum file path per Microsoft is 256 characters.

This one was 270 characters. I shortened the name to “DocPolicy.docx.”

Bingo, there it was!

He reminded them that they also need to use some common sense.

I told them they need to use some common sense for this.

They should not just copy the chapter heading in its entirety.

I wrote it up as “WHAT NOT TO DO,” and copied the QA Director and all the QA supervisors.

I also copied that facility’s plant manager.

Lol. That file name was doing way too much. When it comes to saving files, sometimes, simple is better.

Now, that was a funny story on how QA got a little lesson in common sense.

Let’s check out the comments of other people on this story.

This user shares their policy.

Here’s another personal experience.

Another one chimes in.

Here’s a suggestion.

We get this all the time, says this one.

It’s called filename, not file paragraph. Lol.