Charging VAT? Foolish to say the least I declare a cake war!
Funny what makes grumpy about things isn’t it. When I was a regular windows user and I was copying groups of large files around it was the totally bonkers time estimates that annoyed me. You really had not idea how long copying a thousand files around locally was going to take, but 7777623 minutes seemed to be somewhat unreasonable.
Now that I’m basically a Mac and Linux boy, there are still things about copying files that annoy me, namely that you have no idea at all how long something it going to take. You fire of a “cp -pr [source] [dest]” and then watch the command-line like a hawk for it to return. I could be seconds, or minutes, or it could have got stuck, but you’ll never know. Just as Windows feedback mechanism is broken because it seems to just make it, the cp command is as broken because it tells you nothing.
Anyway – what a handy command rsync is (just copy changes, makes backing up sweet), and it has a brilliant option which will tell you what it is up to too. Check out the following, which will copy from [source] [dest], preserving file permissions and recursing down the source tree. Crucially however, it will also tell you what it is doing and how far through it is.
rsync -rp –progress [source] [dest]
Just a little feedback can really help settle your nerves when you’re shifting big files, or big numbers of files about, and the same goes for lots of things. In business, when you are relying on an external party the smallest bit of meaningful feedback can really make all the difference. As I’ve tried to explain several times over the last few years “I don’t need to know exactly what you are doing, and I’m not going to demand it happens faster, but if you don’t tell me anything at all, I’m just going to become hugely frustrated and keep ringing you”.
I love when you send an email to a company and they email you stright back with something that says “Hi, this is the automated emailer as XY Corp. Thanks for your message, it’s in a queue and the reference number is 123. We’ll get back to you inside Z hours, but if you’ve not heard anything after then, or it becomes super urgent, please contact us via [other method]“.
It’s just tremendous – my nerves are settled, my expectation is managed, I’ll happily sit tight until Z hours latter, because if it becomes critical in the meantime I have the power to do something, and if after Z hours nothing has happened, I’m not left hanging.
So – take not people – improve your customer service and be more like rsync, than cp.
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Charging VAT? Foolish to say the least I declare a cake war!
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