In recent days, an e-mail and a set of cool-but-silly pictures has been making the rounds, showing an airplane hangar overflowing with foam. Now, the public affairs officers at Ellsworth Air Base — who have some time on their hands, obviously — have gone to the trouble of writing up a “news” article to dis that e-mail, complaining that it “has caused considerable work in correcting wrong information.“
One Air Force insider’s reaction to the overreaction: “It was a dang foam test. What does it matter if people think it went a little overboard?” This is “the first time I have seen a news release to disprove an email,” he adds. “Especially one that is relatively innocuous.”
The misrepresentation of this test has raised the level of awareness about the far-reaching effects of e-mail and technology.
Master Sgt. Dana Rogers, 28th Communications Squadron superintendent of network security, said e-mails such as the one depicting the foam test misrepresent our capabilities and can even cause damage to computer networks.
You think its so funny, so you send it to 10 people. Then, they send it to 10 more. This takes up an extremely large amount of e-mail space and can lead to the loss of resources, he said.
Another aspect of e-mails that miscommunicate facts is the amount of time someone may have to take in order to set the record straight. An e-mail that took two seconds to send caused a large number of man-hours to set straight.
“This is supposed to be a lesson about misuse of government resources,” the insider replies. “But in an age where I can buy a terabyte of storage for a relatively small amount of money, who really cares about ‘email space’? Besides, they put a hard cap on my storage space at work, so I am forced to delete things (and email) before I can log off if I go above it.
“It seems to me that some PA type at Ellsworth is a bit anal that the story got outside of their control, and they felt they had to spend ‘a large number of man-hours to set straight.’”
And you wonder why Pentagon higher-ups think their PR shops are so lame?
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Just letting it burn itself out is obviously a non-starter. Can’t get glowing OPR/EPRs unless you’re seen to be doing stuff. “Saved 49.3 hours this year by not chasing own tail” does not a glowing bullet make…
Actually, forwarding around an email with multiple pictures in it is a problem for the amount of bandwidth that it consumes on the network, not the storage space required to store the message after it has been received. Imagine firefighters trying to put out a fire with a whole bunch of people opening hydrants elsewhere to simply play in the water stream from them. The firemen would be left with much less pressure to fight the fire and could even conceivably run out of water if enough other hydrants were opened. The same principle applies to data communications networks. People passing around email messages “for fun” that require a large amount of bandwidth, effectively clog the data communications network and prevent those with legitimate official business to communicate in a timely, efficient manner. This should be the reason for being concerned about a message of this type, not the accuracy, or inaccuracy, of its content.
This single email did take many man hrs. to resolve and is still causing problems. That 4 meg .pps was emailed thousands of time over and that does cause bandwidth concerns, possibly locking up the exchange queue. Also, the maintenance commander @ Ellsworth has spent way too much time explaining this to other AF leaders, therefore wasting time. I work in the 28 CS network security shop, I know this to be true.
HAAAAAAAAAA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!
MORONS!!!!!! ALL MORONS!!!!!!!!!!!!
I was a photographer for the U.S. Air Fore in 97 and stationed at Grand Forks AFB ND. We had the same thing happen when the system went off by itself and I was called to photograph the the situation. I saw the photos a few weeks ago and they looked like the same photos I had taken a few years eailer. They properly had a good reason for doing this test, but by far the most important should be for training, getting used to work in that kind of stuff, I would hate to be in an hager fire and not trust the equipment to work. As a Photographer I know their’s times when you have to wonder why am I thaking these photos and wasting my time, BUT to me, in this situstion, this can be a very important photographic assigment providing valuable information to the maintenance personnel. This appears not to be one of those time where the photographer is out taking Happy Snaps for a good time.