by There’s nothing more disappointing than the realization that a soft promise is not a hard fact and that eagerness does not equal integrity. Such is the case of the ever-widening hardship that Google Apps are not ready for prime time success because there are too many innate technical blunders that instantly hamstring any promise of safe data in the cloud. For the past three days I’ve been having horrible Google Apps Calendar misfires — yet checking the official Google Apps Status Dashboard this morning reveals no trouble with the Calendar — even though it isn’t working.
I’ve had the same problem in the past with Google Apps Calendar not saving entries. I went around and around with Google Calendar support as they blamed me and not themselves for my missing data.
Finally, they found the problem on their end and solved it — but getting them to that point of confession was spirit crushing and hope destroying — and I even wrote the first book to print about Google Apps, so it isn’t like I’m a know-nothing nobody! Feel secure in knowing that Google doesn’t discriminate and refuses to play favorites. We all suffer in the same, churning, tub, you and me.
I won’t ever contact Google Calendar support again because dealing with them was like doing hard time at Pelican Bay but without the fun of three hot meals a day and the nighttime shankings.
What, I ask rhetorically, is more pernicious than a calendar that refuses to save appointments — naked babies banned from trains not withstanding — and the answer is, “Nothing!” … but that’s precisely what Google Calendar has been doing to me: I add entries and, a day later, all those appointments have disappeared into the Google cloud never to be seen again!
The problem with Google losing your appointments is that it doesn’t happen right away. It happens during the night while you’re sleeping, so you wake up in the morning quite certain you had filled in certain days on your Calendar only to realize those appointments no longer exist except somewhere in your prehistoric memory.
Restoring lost appointments is a real hassle because you don’t train yourself to keep a copy in the Google cloud and on your desk. Why should I have to keep a paper copy of my Calendar to back up the Google cloud? If I have to write down my appointments on paper in the first place, why add all those entries to my Google Calendar in the second place?
If your Google calendar begins to act up — signs of that choking are entries that you can’t edit, calendars that fail to load, renamed calendars that revert to their original name and Google refusing to save new entries — stop what you’re doing and log out of Google Calendar. Stay away for a day or two and see if the problem resolves on its own. Make paper notes for what you hope to enter later if the Google Calendar begins to behave again and you decide to invest your trust and time again.
The most curious thing over these past three days was any entry I tried to save that started with the word “Banned” would not save! Those entries would either freeze or immediately not show up after saving.
If history is any guide with Google — and it always is in this case of the Apps Calendar — all the work I originally entered will show up in a few days to clutter up and confuse all the redone entries I had to pull from muscle memory; and when Google Calendar finds copies of appointments and conflicts in time, it will barf a boot and I really hate waiting for that other shoe to drop.
What a tremendous disappointment. My company relies on Google Calendar to make appointments for various things. I did notice a couple of disappearing appointments last week but wrote it off to my own inattention.
Oh, wow, Gordon! That’s pretty scary. That’s precisely how it happens, so it’s hard to track: “I thought I put that appointment there. Hmmm…” We blame ourselves instead of Google.
Most of my appointments have file names and descriptions and other detailed stuff attached, so when things go missing I’m more apt to notice than if I were just adding names and times and not going into Edit view.
I think the problem was solved the last time when Google realized I was interacting with the calendar in Month view. The corruption was only happening in that interface, I guess, and once they accepted some people love the Month view as the standard view — things started to quickly get fixed.
Let us know if those missing appointments show up again in a few days!