I woke up this morning and remembered that I hadn't read my comics archives in a couple of days. I caught this Sunday's Dilbert and said (as I often do) "Man, I can relate!" It was an occurrence about two weeks ago. My job involves engineering assistance and support for our customers. Thanks to modern technology our clients can usually upload a large data file showing their configuration and the results they're seeing. From there I can explain why, what's wrong, etc.
Most often when there's a handful of files to be sent, the customer will use one of two common formats to bundle them up into one compressed archive file: the popular Windows format Winzip or the popular Unix format tar.gz. I download the file, run it through the appropriate software, and I now have a local copy of the files I need to reproduce and/or examine the issue the customer sees.
Two weeks ago I had a customer send me an archive in the almost unheard of RAR format. My goodness, I thought, didn't that format die decades ago? I had to research it a bit and see what I might do to get at the data. None of our machines had the software to unpack it. I don't have (or want) administrator privileges on any of our work unix machines. I didn't want to bother to download and compile software manually in my local unix directory. Way to much work. And I didn't feel like installing another piece of software on my laptop to unpack just this one file. Note that in five years of engineering support work, this is the first time someone had ever sent a RAR archive. It would likely be the last.
At first I sent a reply back saying, "please send this in a more common format". Then I noticed that the domain of the sender's email was ".cn" -- in other words China. For heaven's sake! It would be a day before he got the message and sent a new file.
In the end I realized my Macintosh could unpack it. Luckily all Mac's ship with Stuffit Expander which unpacks a huge number of formats, including the obscure RAR format. I put the file on my Mac, unpacked it, repackaged it in common format, and put the new archive back on my work machine. In the end I felt like Wally did in the Dilbert cartoon, jumping through hoops just to do what normally takes a minute. I'd wasted an hour or more just to get a look at the customer's data. When you waste that much time, it almost does feel like an accomplishment just to open a file!