Nice, if you are issued a tablet and smartphone, or can extract permission to hook you rown electronics into the company net. For those of us who can’t, sucks to be us :rolleyes:
I thought I was the only one. My coworker will print the email from a customer requesting a test certificate and walk it over to my desk for me to look it up. Then he wants me to print the correct document that I have in pdf form in my computer so he can fax it (or worse, scan and email it) to the customer.
I’m having a hard time imagining neither situation applying (and it’s my own gear, in this situation). Yup, you’re screwed. Take comfort that you won’t have to probably print out thousands of pages of redundant documentation because some company is worried about the Feds, at least.
Holy mackeral GC. She is younger than me and I stopped training people on this stuff over 10 years ago.
The printer/scanner in my current office prints from memsticks, but not from any memstick(1). For some reason there’s some it simply doesn’t like. I have one of the stikcs it does like, so I know how often about a dozen of my coworkers print anything out. Cracks me up any time I get someone asking for “the Magic Stick, please”.
1: most of us are contractors and our computers are supplied by ourselves or our employers, so it’s easier for everybody to use memsticks than for IT to configure 50 different computers with 7 or 8 different SOs.
Christ, I hope I never turn into one of these people.
I can see myself at 67, trying to use this newfangled subcranial sensory input that’s pretty much a staple of any home or office. “Agent Foxtrot, you need to imagine in your head… think about that folder opening up. No, there’s no keyboard or mouse; this isn’t 2025 anymore, okay? No, don’t try to touch the holo-screen; that won’t get you anywhere. Focus, focus. Okay, you managed to open Minesweeper, but that’s not what you wanted. No, stop trying to touch the holo-screen; there’s nothing there! Ugh, okay, we can probably find an old keyboard and mouse somewhere, but they’re tough to come by these days. Just sit tight until I get back and watch Marvel’s Avengers. It’s a classic.”
Well I’ll be damned. But I doubt we’ll be forking over the cash for that. 
My company was sued by a mega-corporation a few years ago. They had some of our scientists go through several years of emails as part of discovery. We eventually prevailed but one of the results is that the company lawyers changed the email policy. All incoming and sent email is deleted after 60 days. The only way to save something important is to print it our or archive it. The stuff that is archived electronically disappears after 18 months.
Some of these folks must be eating up reams of paper every month. I worked in city government for six years and don’t recall ever printing a single email. But then our Exchange guys were on the ball as far as archiving and backups go.
I have a JPG of my signature which I can insert into a document to satisfy requests for signed and faxed documents. Some people seem to want to reject this solution but can never explain why. Why does it matter whether my signature comes out of your fax machine or your printer? In fact it looks a lot nicer from a printer because the signature’s blue ink shows up. In a fax it would be rendered in muddy gray-scale.
My wife has printed out many of the love emails I sent to her when we were dating. Does that count? I didn’t know that until quite a while later, when she showed me the collection. She has them stored in a special keepsake box.
Be careful! Everything you said in those is probably enforceable in divorce court, and she has hard copy evidence! You better keep loving her.
An ex-Boss told me to email a letter and also send a hard copy. She dictated it while I typed it into the email and hit send. I then went to sent emails, hilighted the body and hit “copy.”
She asked me “Why are you doing that?”
I opened Microsoft World, new document, and hit paste. “Cause I ain’t typing it again.”
She did not know you could do that.
Let me tell you about the SISU.
Back when I was working we had a system called the SISU, which I imagine stands for something. It’s the system where we keep track of who’s working and who’s off. You can track down who worked each job on a given day plus see who had a day off or called in sick or was out at training or whatever.
It’s all done on computers and we had to do it three times a day, once for each eight-hour shift. And then, once we put all the information on the computer, we had to print it all out and put it in a file cabinet. So we’d have a record.
Do you think anyone ever actually went and looked at an old SISU? Of course not, that would have been ridiculous. If you wanted to know who had been working on a certain day, you called the information up on the computer. But departmental policy required us to maintain paper records.
I work for a smallish law firm. Lawyers save hard-copy shit for CYA purposes like nobody’s business. It comes in handy on a regular basis, as in when my main boss was working for his previous Incredibly Shrinking Law Firm, and decided to jump ship on less than 2 weeks’ notice and take his practice to another firm. We didn’t exactly have the time (nor did either of us have the expertise) to plan a thorough IT transition.
The previous firm has since shrunk down to almost nothing and purged many old e-mails, files from the server, etc., plus their one lone overworked IT person/paralegal isn’t exactly making her first priority of searching ancient e-mail archives. I can’t tell you how many times a hard copy of an e-mail has turned out to be vital.
See, I’d be more inclined to copy and paste into Word for that sort of backup.
Why bother with the extra step when you can just print the e-mail?
A hollowed-out laptop, perhaps?
This reminds me of something I saw a good number of years ago. My younger sister had a friend whose parents had a company that designed some sort of illustrated educational books for children. My sister took me there one day to show me the offices and computers. As you might expect in a business that does a lot of graphic design and page layout, the computers all had “large” monitors - 19" CRTs when most people were still using 15" or 17" monitors.
The problem was that they were all set to 800x600 resolution, completely defeating the purpose of having a larger screen.