The store I work for belongs to a grocery co-op. The members are the owners. I am always appalled at the amount of paper this co-op generates, redundant everything: order books, weekly order books, pre-order books, stupid announcements, etc. Every week the same exact order books. Everyweek at least a ream’s worth of redundant paper. Times 300-400 stores. That’s a lot of wasted paper.
Today, we get in the store mail a memo. The store owner brings it right out and says, “Here’s a hot memo and you must read it Immediatly!” And me being the smart ass, “What? I’ll bet they’re out of paper and don’t know what to do.”
Here’s the memo: (on salmon colored paper)
TO: STORE OWNERS
FROM: THE MAIL ROOM
YOUR MEAT ORDER BOOK HAS BEEN RUN ON SALMON COLORED PAPER DUE TO A SHORTAGE OF PINK. THERE IS ALSO A DIFFERENT COVER ON IT THIS WEEK.
WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE.
Now the rant:
Have you people any brains? Do you know you are running a business? Ever heard of a thing called expense control? Who is so fucking anal about the color of paper you have to waste all this time and money? You should print the stuff on toilet paper, at least there would be a use for it. This was just stupid, stupid, stupid. Let me be the CEO of this co-op for just one year. You could pay me just $1 plus half of the savings from me cutting the use of paper. I could then retire a rich man and the members could get a big rebate check at the end of the year.
Just stop being stupid and look into Modern Business Practices. There are things called computers, the internet, email, fax machines. You should look into them.
Rant over.
I know it’s pretty mild, but I wanted that stupid memo on the internet and I want it ridiculed. I hate waste and stupidity.
And I bet nobody would have noticed a difference between the salmon and the pink, had the idiots not wasted the money to advise people of the difference.
Geezus. Some companies are just…
At my job, we were ordered to go paperless.
And yet, only the supervisors get email privileges…and so the rest of us minions have memos distributed on…paper.
In a “paperless” society.
So much money is wasted on paper that they used to advertise company potlucks, or company outing nights…all of which would be better served through email.
I’m sorry, but did you see the sticky at the top of the forum? See, we’re now putting a cover sheet on all our TPS rants. So, if you could do that from now on, that would be great. ok?
I agree that paperless is often a good thing, but not always. We’re supposed to be phasing out paper manuals and doing all our research on line. Which is fine, unless there’s a power outage or the server goes down or the repository of the scanned manuals goes down… And because of the way the electronic copies are set up in Adobe Acrobat, page 273 of the manual is likely to be page 295 of the electronic document. Not a very efficient way to do research.
Similar problems with our engineering drawings. Many times, I can look at a digital image and get the info I need, but when the system crashes, (and they have at least half a dozen times in the past year) I have to go to the tech library and have them print my a copy. And sometimes you have to have a paper copy even if the electronic systems are all working just fine.
At least our boss doesn’t require his secretary to print out all his emails.
He was. He likes to get light my sarcastic fuse every now and again; it amuses him when I get going on a rant about something. I guess that’s his way to get it out of my system so I’m not sarcastic to our customers! (Yet a whole 'nother rant)
I have an almost “opposite” comment. My former boss would always crack the rest of us up (we were all as “paperless” as we could get).
We’d go tell her, before going out into the field, or leaving for the day, “Hey, that draft report on XXX Site Investigation is done and ready for you to peer review”.
Then, almost without fail she’d call us later on and say “where’d you guys put it? I’ve looked in everyone’s office, I can’t find it”.
And we’d say “oh, it’s in the XXX Reports Directory”. And then she’d say “But, I looked there, are you sure you didn’t file it somewhere else”? We’d answer, “the COMPUTER directory, not the file cabinet directory”.
This wasn’t a dumb woman either, she was just so geared for things to be on paper, and filed in the filing cabinet or somewhere that she could lay her hands on, PHYSICALLY, that she’d do this at least two or three times during the reporting season.
The funny thing is, that she was pretty young too (mid 30s), not one you’d think was of the “them damn new fangled computer things” mindset.
After awhile, it got to be a running joke with us, if we needed to leave a document to be peer reviewed, we’d say “Lily (not her real name) on the comPUTer, the comPUTer”!!!
