Chicken

Several years ago, a guy named frank perdue had a company that sold chicken pieces, and the company had a slogan of 'It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken'. I thought of that this morning while I was reading through various web sites that seemed to have information about how to write a Lotuscript script (I know, that looks redundant)to automatically forward email.

Lotus script is the programming language that underlies the Lotus Mail product (and other Lotus functions). Its a lot like Visual Basic. Lotus itself used to be a small, elegant product developed and sold by a small, focused company. Then it was bought by IBM and.... it got huge. HUGE. And when that happened, in addition to the guys who ran the place getting rich (and one of them now works at Microsoft, doing it all again), the product got way kludgy. Now, if you have a problem, you'd better be good at reading manuals, because you're absolutely not going to get help from Lotus. As soon ask the vagrant on the corner as expect help from them. Whats odd is that they really do know what they're talking about.... they just can't communicate it worth a darn.

Enter the net. If you do a search for 'Lotus Script' (or Lotuscript) and 'mail', or 'forwarding', and you find bunches of references. Once you remove the ones that just use the words but are talking about something else, you find a lot of people who say they know how to do it -- but when you read the comments, you find lots of 'oh, thats easy, just use the help file' and 'oh, yeah, just do it like this, more or less'. No one seems to be able to say 'this works; do this'. Don't doubt that there ARE such people, but try and find them. Which is what leads me to think about Mr. Perdue. It takes a smart man to make a simple statement -- and none of these guys are that.

Course, neither am I!