flatlined, I feel your pain. Lucky for you, it’s a flashback. For me, it’s ongoing. Every office in my building is paperless…but for the attorneys. The courts issue orders online, we accept, put in our electronic case files. They have law clerks who do nothing but pull/print/file. Same goes with motions filed, etc.
If I have to review an order with an attorney, I can’t just pull the attorney’s paper file. I have to kill a tree printing from our electronic file, bring it over. They put their opinion on a separate form. I then have to shred the order and upload the opinion. Now, the majority of my coworkers and I don’t work in office anymore. So, if we have an issue, instead of attaching an order to an email and communicating that way, we have to drive our asses in to meet f2f - pay for gas / parking just for a 15 minute consult. I won’t even comment on how many attorneys won’t even do a phone consult on a non-case specific matter.
If the damn courts can get with the times, why can’t the attorneys?
They’re government attorneys. No billing time. Moonlitherial pretty much hit it on the nose, but add a dash of control issues and a sprinkle of backasswardness.
I had a sadly short-lived job where we were allowed to change the priority of tickets and the service agreement included penalties for the customers if they mis-set too many. The boss made it very clear that we weren’t to just go and downmark everything, but also that “I’m too important to RTFM” wasn’t an acceptable reason to ask for a modification to a program or mark something “high”. And yes, if something was down-set we were to upgrade it too.
Trying to troubleshoot a problem and the person on the other end of the email chain offered to send a screen shot. Great! Screen shots are helpful! Fabulous!!!
Except …
Said person wanted to print it out and fax it to me.
It’s not just attorneys - it seems to be every guy over 50 who has an ounce of control in a business. At the last job I was at, I was working with the safety manuals - the plan was to have them online, available for everyone, plus printed copies, and they had plans to create about 40 or so printed copies in binders so everyone could have a copy in their own Fiefdom (that would have to be updated with every little correction that came along). This is far from an aberration - no one wants to trust the electronic copies. In my experience, having the ability to have everything online just means that you will now have everything online AND in paper copies! Whee!
I’m hoping that when all the Boomers and their need to have physical copies of everything retire, we might actually truly be able to go paperless.
I wish. Our corporate PTBs have decided to allow personal use so long as it doesn’t interfere with job performance. Job moral and all that wonderful stuff.
About half the time that I remote to a workstation someone will have Facebook or eBay open.
Fortunately with the upgrade to Windows 7, security has managed to lock things down to the point that Jack and Jill Luser can’t install random crapware toolbars and garbage.
We are all administrators on our machines and can do whatever we want. Every once in a while someone will do something really stupid to their machine (get a virus, install something they shouldn’t have). They receive a public shaming.
When we were recently required to change a frequently updated online manual from HTML to Word format, we deliberately set it up for maximum on-screen readability and inability to print properly. Users can still print it, but only if they download a copy of the file and then spend a fair amount of effort to reformat it.
Oh, one of my coworkers would stroke out. She will IM me, asking where something is in the online manual (ignore the whole she could look for herself aspect - we’ve tried), I’ll link the page and she prints it out. It doesn’t matter if I gave her the link before, it could have been an hour prior, trees are felled. If she had to dink with it before hitting print?
This is the only person I have ever known to be written up due to her cubicle mess. It’s bad.
The waste was sickening. When I started there, we tossed the shred into the landfill. I’m not talking about one or two kitchen garbage bags, I’m talking about at least 150 50 lb. bags a week.
That was one of the first things I changed and by the time I left, the Lion’s Club guys would show up with a big trailer and the Adult Probation folks would show up with people doing community service to load the trailer.
People thought I was wonderful for making those changes. I was amazing, I was outstanding. It was good PR about the County being green, it gave the Adult Probation Office some easy to supervise community service and the Lion’s club sells paper to buy glasses. Are you already :smack: at this?
I made people shut the lights off in unused parts of the warehouse. After about a year, I got a nice email from the head of Finance who had noticed that the electricity bill had lowered substantially. :smack:
Just thinking about the 3 year battle I had over insulating the 50 year old building makes me need to scratch TWO kitteh bellies.
(Bakerboy is a foster cat. A very nice teenaged guy who gets along with our resident cats. I didn’t name him, but I agree with his name. He’s the happiest cat ever, always kneading bread at just the slightest suggestion that he will get human attention.)
Offers you lots of chocolate. I didn’t have to actually deal with the attorneys, I just had to do what I could with their scared assistants. Wait, you probably can’t have chocolate, want some sugar peas?
It’s been two weeks since my shift was changed and we get off an hour later. Nothing else changed, so most things have to be done at the same time as before. We get almost everything we need to get done by the time we used to get off, spending the last hour or so trying to look busy, mostly sweeping the warehouse. I want to blow my brains out from boredom.
Today, I pierced my thumb with a paperclip. I was standing on a rolling ladder, grabbed a box that was over my head and when I lifted it, a bent paperclip went through the pad of my thumb from left to right.
OWOWOW!!!
So now, I have my hand stuck to a semi-heavy box and I’m afraid to pull it down because of the way my hand would have to rotate. My minion was at lunch, so screaming for help wasn’t a viable option, but I treated myself to a few loud words anyhow.
After I realized how stupid this was, I remembered that I had my phone in my pocket. Should I call for help and have everyone laugh and point, or deal with this myself? Of course I picked the stupid option and started feeling my thumb with my left hand so I could figure out the best way to unhook myself.
Fingers bleed a lot, so there was blood running down my arm in a very dramatic fashion when my minion came back from lunch early. He turned as white as my legs and staggered and I was so afraid that he was going to faint and hit his head on the hard floor that I solved the problem by yanking the box down, tossing it on the floor and running to put my bloody hands on him.
Its oddly painless. The wound bled very well from both sides and I did the whimpy hold my hand out and close my eyes while minion poured peroxide over it.
