Rodney M Bliss

My Email System Has A Check Engine Light

I hate it. It’s like a lingering headache, or constantly having the hiccups, or the drip, drip, drip of a leaky faucet.

The check engine light in my Yukon is on. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I know why. It’s because the big eight cylinder engine isn’t getting enough oxygen. The O2 sensor keeps tripping the check engine light. I can clear the code, but it will come back within 20 miles. It’s not a serious issue. It means I don’t have as much power and my gas milage sucks.

I have an expensive sensor reader. It tells me tons about my car and can clear codes. In fact, I have three code readers. And I’m actually pretty good at using them. I’m leaving my engine light on for now. There’s lots different things to test and replace.

I didn’t always have a code reader. And I haven’t always understood how to read the codes. And I’ve sometimes let my check engine light stay on without understanding what it was trying to tell me.

It’s a mistake.

When Office 365 came out the company I worked for at the time did a staged migration from Exchange. My department was one of the early adopters. (IT often is.) But, for some reason my name was left off the migration list.

Honestly, I didn’t really care too much. I wasn’t part of the migration team. I knew it was happening, but didn’t worry too much about when my turn would come.

And then came the day the check engine light came on.

Rodney, can you reach out to the “X71” distribution list and let them know?

I don’t see that DL?

All Office 365 users shoudl have access to it.

That explain it, I’m not on O365.

We must have missed you when we did your department. Just open a ticket and we’ll take care of it.

I knew I needed to get migrated. I just kept putting it off. I mean, I had it on my TODO list, but it never broke into the active status.

And then we had an outage. A bad one. It took down many of our backend systems including email. We were using text, Skype and phone calls. I could mostly get work done. But, then I realized that not everything was broken. In fact, some email was working fine. Office 365 was still up and running.

That wasn’t terrible. I could use Skype for most things until the system came back online.

And, like all systems, our engineers eventually got it back up and running. But, it wasn’t completely back. In fact, it was “back” because they created new mailboxes for our accounts. None of the 5 GB of archive data I had was there. None of the hundreds of folders I used to organize my projects were there. And none of the contacts I’d added over the previous several years were there.

Office 365 users? Yeah, they were just fine.

Eventually I rebuilt my system of folders and I got migrated to O365. But, it was a reminder to me to not ignore the check engine light.

I think I’ll take my car in and have them look at the O2 sensor next week.

Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.

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(c) 2019 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved

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