I’m sure Big Brother does have a cache of all information stored on our computers, but good luck getting him to let you access another person’s files.
Anyway, in the case of my coworker, the important emails are eight years old with unremarkable subject headings. I barely have enough time to sort through my own emails every day. I can’t imagine going through a decade’s worth of someone else’s in the hope of finding important information.
The last 7 years I worked, I was virtually paperless. Usually the only things I’d print out were travel itineraries, travel orders, and emails confirming that I was to attend training or conferences and that my security information had been passed to a specific person at my destination. It would save frantic calls between security offices if something got screwed up.
We had multiple reorganizations over those 7 years - I think I sat at 13 different desks - and being paperless made it lots easier to move. Two boxes of personal stuff and office supplies, and I was good to go.
I keep checking posting dates to make sure I’m not reading a zombie thread from ten years ago.
I have a co-worker who came out of retirement to work here (his expertise was needed). Imagine my shock and horror on his first day, when I walked into the office and heard the distinctive sounds of a typewriter clacking away in his office. To his credit, it was, at least, an electric typewriter. I peeked in his office door and was really shocked and horrified to discover he was typing a Post-it Note. :eek: WTF?
Turns out, he’d told some Head of Something somewhere that he missed his old typewriter and would like to have one in his office. She requisitioned one from a storage warehouse and had it sent over, as sort of a joke. He was typing a thank-you note on the Post-it as sort of a joke. In general, he uses his PC and doesn’t even require printing stuff out – we’ve taught him to think and work electronically. But he likes to keep the typewriter around to jack up the young whippersnappers around the office. His name is Randy. I call him “Randy-saurus Rex.” He thinks that’s hilarious.
I did the same thing when I got to “PC technology is relatively new…” Then I did a comedy double-take when I saw that the post date was like, yesterday.
The last time I went to an indexing conference there was a person there who still swears by printing out PDFs of page proofs and indexing from them, instead of doing what the rest of us sane people started doing a long time ago, which is indexing from the electronic version on the screen. This same person didn’t see the point in having a smartphone. When told by the rest of us that it can be really helpful in terms of getting freelance jobs, because you can check your email all the time and respond to inquiries quickly, she said, “Oh, I have an email but I only check it once a week or so.”
I honestly have no idea how she continues to have income. Maybe all of her clients are holdouts from 1985 too.
The editor of the first magazine I worked on (from 1998 to 2000) had a large, old manual typewriter under his desk, marked “In Case of Emergency”. He told me that a few years earlier, when the entire computer system went down, he’d resorted to typing out entire articles and faxing them to an office in a different location. 
My Project Manager is around 60. She’s been with the company for 30 years. She emigrated from her homeland just after she finished university and graduated as a lawyer. Since Ontario wouldn’t recognize the foreign degree she couldn’t practice here and so she took a computer diploma here instead.
She prints emails and room booking confirmations. She never includes the room in the meeting invitations, but mentions it in the body. This week she asked me how long she had the room booked for. I told that I don’t have that information since she books them separately. She was still annoyed that I couldn’t figure out what she had done.
She has her screen set to a terrible resolution that is big enough for her to read, but fuzzy enough to be difficult to read. The font is also big enough that there are scroll bars for every window. This probably wouldn’t be a problem except that she doesn’t understand how the scroll bars work. She must enter an approval process every couple of weeks that employs smaller windows in a browser. When I create the document I can see everything on one screen. She has to scroll around to find the information. It would be nice if she used the scroll wheel on the company issued mouse, but she doesn’t seem to know what it is for, so she consistently thinks that we have forgotten to add required information (that she couldn’t see because she isn’t scrolling everywhere). While I can see deficiencies in the process, she keeps accusing us of forgetting stuff and doesn’t recognize that it is her that isn’t seeing it. That process hasn’t changed in years.
I amazed her a couple of weeks ago when I copied and pasted a number of items in a few seconds. It was her first exposure to CTRL-C, CTRL-V.
When after-hours communication is required, an email to her laptop is not sufficient (because she doesn’t take it home). We need to leave her a voice-mail that she will check. This means that I have to send an email with the details to the team and then call her voice mail and read the F*ing email to her over the phone. I refuse to do this, she can get the details in the email that I send out.
My boss just wanted to print out something on a clear label, in white text, to place on a colored surface. I had to explain that there is no such thing as white toner. Nothing would show up. She’d have to create a colored box, put the text inside it, and it would print the colored part, leaving the “white” there.
This is not the first time I have had to explain this.
I used to have a coworker, who when I asked her to send me a copy of an email she received would print it out and fax it to me.
Unfortunately out IT depertment has banned personal electroinc items from being connected to company computers and only executives are issues any smart devices.
For me, the opposite is true.
Let’s say I need a copy of the email Bob sent me a few months ago about the Widget. It’s a lot easier to go to my inbox (because I’m one of those people who keeps 90% of my emails in my inbox, not in separate folders,) go to the search bar, and type in “Bob Widget.”
Takes five seconds.
Though I guess a lot of people aren’t used to searching for email that way…how often does someone go “hold on, let me find that email…looking…scrolling down…or is it in that folder? Let me check there…looking…”
Use the search bar! That’s why it’s there! Do you find webpages that way? Just get a big ol’ list of webpages and start looking for the one you want?
The person mentioned in the OP sounds like she’s overdoing it, but there are several legitimate reasons to print out emails.
As a reminder for something. Why would you make a separate note someplace when you can simply hit the Print button?
For convenience. If you need to make notes about the email (possibly as a prelude to replying to it) it’s much simpler to have the notes and the “note-ee” in the same location.
For back-up and documentation. This is possibly the biggest one. I have never understood why so many people think that a purely electronic existence is sufficient for something important. Servers crash. PCs get malware. Transformers get hit by lightning. Cables get dug up and/or cut. CDs get scratched. Storage forms become obsolete.
But if you print something out, then you have a physical object whose existence is totally independent of any computer-related issues. And as long as you take basic care to protect against fire and water, even cheap paper will last for a very long time.
And then she put a little note at the bottom asking you to please fax it back, because it’s her only copy?
Sure there is! See here. It’s commonly used to print on clear decals, like those used for model airplanes, model railroad cars, etc.
But it’s not cheap: $960 for the toner cartridge, and probably $400 for a new, clean set of drums in the printer. I doubt it’s worth setting aside a printer for him to use occasionally.
Because you can set reminders in Outlook. Bonus: you can set them to pop up at any point in the future when you’d need the reminder e.g. weeks or months in the future if necessary.
I’m sorry, I’m not following this one. As a prelude to replying, I … type a reply. As a draft.
Psssh. If my company’s servers completely fry up and they lose everything, that’s THEIR problem, not mine. (Personal stuff on your home computer is different, sure, but this is a work-based thread.)
There are entire companies, with entire product lines, to archive and search emails. Many companies do not buy this kind of software until they get sued and have to perform discovery, but it does exist.
I agree with you, getting someone to let you search your coworker’s old emails would probably have taken as much time as searching them. But that’s because bosses are jerks, not because the tools don’t exsit.
And last job, we had a screw up on the server and lost everything in the calendars. I prefer to make a micronote on a paper wall calendar reminding me of obligations. We also lost the 3 current months of emails.
OK. I’m impressed with that.
If you’re using state or federal money on a project, you’re expected to create a set of Project Files, in binders, and have them available for auditing up to X years after the close of the project. X varies depending on the program supplying the grant. Correspondence is expected to be part of the Project Files.
I’ve heard one or two people say that having an electronic version to hand would be accepted, but I’m not sure I’d want to be the first person to test that.
Here, emails auto-delete at three years. This is after many years of employees complaining when they auto-deleted at 90 days. The software was supposed to come with an archiving function, which would allow us to store archived emails indefinitely. But that never happened.
I’ve encountered these people at my workplace…it blows their minds when you show them “Print Screen”. 
Emails get printed a lot where I work. In my department, they’re typically included as backup information in reports. It’s also customary for the customer service people to include copies of all email correspondence for each job in their respective folders.
Corporate IT has a really screwy approach to email archives. We’re no longer allowed to store our archives on the company server (I’ve actually had a corporate rep call me to demand that I remove *.pst files from my folder on the server). This means that all archives are stored on the local hard drive…when the hard drive crashes, your emails are gone. I’ve found a way around this – my own emails are safely backed up – but it wasn’t an easy solution, and I’m positive no one outside of my department has even considered how bad local hard drive archiving can be.
My calendar also syncs both to my iPad and iPhone, so I’m at least good there. Where I work, we have several thousand employees and a very large IT department, so if we lost 3 months worth of E-mails, I can’t imagine the scope of the fuck-up that would have caused that.
I just had a study monitor from a pharmaceutical company come out to my site today, and they’re reconsidering their policy on how to keep copies of Investigator Brochures. The IB is basically the long-form “manual” describing the research that’s been done on a particular medication. This particular drug has a 610 page manual. So far there have been 4 revisions to this manual during the course of this study. We’re doing 3 studies with this drug. So far, I’ve been storing the approved copies on USB drives that are filed with the other documentation.
They want me to print out each of the 4 versions of the manual 3 times, one for each study. No, I probably can’t just print one copy of each because my medical center’s Institutional Review Board put a unique-per-study approval stamp on each page of the PDF, and the sponsor wants that to appear on the hard copy. Not only that, our big printer that does double-sided printing tends to choke on those kind of copies in anywhere from 10 to 50 copies into the document. So either I get to babysit the big printer and clear jams/reset every few minutes, or I go ahead and make the printer burn through over 7200 pieces of paper for single-sided copies, 3-hole punch all of them and store them in binders, and then try to find room to stash all of them, just because someday the FDA might come knocking and they want us to keep all that paper around now.
We already have printed paper approval letters from the IRB listing each approval of a copy of the IB. We can pull up the approved copies online via our research website. And there are the copies on the USB drives. But that might not be enough. :smack:
The next time a pharma company complains about the budget offer we make, I’m going to point at their Investigator Brochure and ask if they’ve priced toner lately.
(Oh yeah, and since our study files include excerpts from medical records or other patient data, we have to store all of this for 10 years (per our own site’s regulations), but then the companies still want you to call them to get permission to destroy them! The last time I called a pharma company about this at the information number they provided, the person I spoke to waffled, then said I better keep them for a while longer “just in case.”)
I can tell you firsthand that, uh - NO. They don’t. Been there, done that, and print whatever I have to so I have a way to CMA. Sucks getting burned. I learned.