Our CIO, John Halamka, who is also CIO of Harvard Medical School, does a very fine job on the big issues facing the hospital's and HMS' IT systems, but he is also on call for personal requests. Here is one that he received from one of our faculty members, on which I was copied. Yes, I am poking fun a bit at the person who wrote it, but I have often noticed a tendency of those of us a from a certain era to blame the systems people and/or their computers for our own errors. I plead guilty on that front, also, from time to time!
Hey, it's not our fault: The technical devices with which we grew up were pencil and paper, analog clocks, and telephones with rotary dials. For those of you reading who view these as quaint: The first had a delete button called an eraser; the second presented a real representation of time, which after all, is based on the continuous -- not discrete -- apparent movement of the sun around the earth -- not a pseudo-precise digitization of same; and the third will help you understand why people still talk about "dialing" a phone number.
Dear John,
Periodically I check my junk mail box as I learned that the messages from the Dean's Office and general mailings from HMS are there. I suspect that I am not alone in this and feel that it may be one reason why our faculty are not as aware of opportunities and other issues as they pertain to the medical school. Is there a way that these messages can be diverted into our inbox? Probably most people delete the junk box without reading the messages there. Thank you for your attention to this as well as everything else you do.
John's reply:
I asked the Email system administrator to log in to your personal account and provide a listing of the email addresses you've blocked as junk. That list includes several categories including allfaculty@listserv.med.harvard.edu. Thus, you've blocked all email from Harvard (the allfaculty) listing. This block only applies to you, not to other faculty members, so others have received the Dean's emails.
To unblock email from Harvard, launch Outlook, select Tools, Options. The General Preferences tab has a button for Junk Email. Delete the entry for allfaculty. I hope this helps!
