Get out more. This is entirely realistic in my experience.
The worst one I ran into was early in my career. This was back during the XP days.
The lady who who did the job before had a certificate e-mailed to her from a lab. She printed the certificate off then slipped two certificates front and back into a plastic sheath and put them into a 4" 3 ring binder.
She then deleted the labs e-mail and electronic copy to save space in her mailbox.
There were around 4,000 of these certificates every year for 5 years when I started. So around 20,000 pages. We had ONE physical copy of a legally required certificate.
Around 15 shipments per year required her to find around 300-400 specific certificates She then had to pull them out of the plastic sheaths, make 3 physical copies and scan one PDF to load to the government agencies webpage.
She would then delete the PDF, and laboriously refile the certificates back into the the plastic sheets.
Oh the binders were also ordered in a way that nobody but her could find anything. It was about as close to random as you could get.
The 15 shipments took around 50% of her time every year.
I hired two temps and gave them a few very boring days. When we were done the certificates were all organized in a logical numerical order and in long-term secure storage. I had a folder on the server with 20,000 PDF files all with a unique name. It took me around 15 minutes to locate, print, and upload the required files for each shipment.
I remember reading a story where the persons job was literally copying data from one program into another, may have even just been between two excel files
New hire came in and wrote a script that did it, and automated that person’s job out of existence
I can kind of see the reason though. If she’s old enough then digital storage space was a really big issue. I can totally see someone having been told 30 years ago to make sure they leave nothing in memory and never updating that knowledge. I don’t know what to say about the rest of it though.
Poor workflow management sadly is quite normal, not the exception. She was in her early 20’s at the time, just completely computer and workflow incompetent. I have seen similar issues with people of all ages. It’s not a generational thing, it’s an aptitude and interest thing.
Please tell me this is sarcasm meant to push the limits of their statement.
Get out more. This is entirely realistic in my experience.
The worst one I ran into was early in my career. This was back during the XP days.
The lady who who did the job before had a certificate e-mailed to her from a lab. She printed the certificate off then slipped two certificates front and back into a plastic sheath and put them into a 4" 3 ring binder.
She then deleted the labs e-mail and electronic copy to save space in her mailbox.
There were around 4,000 of these certificates every year for 5 years when I started. So around 20,000 pages. We had ONE physical copy of a legally required certificate.
Around 15 shipments per year required her to find around 300-400 specific certificates She then had to pull them out of the plastic sheaths, make 3 physical copies and scan one PDF to load to the government agencies webpage.
She would then delete the PDF, and laboriously refile the certificates back into the the plastic sheets.
Oh the binders were also ordered in a way that nobody but her could find anything. It was about as close to random as you could get.
The 15 shipments took around 50% of her time every year.
I hired two temps and gave them a few very boring days. When we were done the certificates were all organized in a logical numerical order and in long-term secure storage. I had a folder on the server with 20,000 PDF files all with a unique name. It took me around 15 minutes to locate, print, and upload the required files for each shipment.
I remember reading a story where the persons job was literally copying data from one program into another, may have even just been between two excel files
New hire came in and wrote a script that did it, and automated that person’s job out of existence
I can kind of see the reason though. If she’s old enough then digital storage space was a really big issue. I can totally see someone having been told 30 years ago to make sure they leave nothing in memory and never updating that knowledge. I don’t know what to say about the rest of it though.
Poor workflow management sadly is quite normal, not the exception. She was in her early 20’s at the time, just completely computer and workflow incompetent. I have seen similar issues with people of all ages. It’s not a generational thing, it’s an aptitude and interest thing.
oof, yeah there’s no reason for even the deleting stuff then.
Man I think this is just ensuring job security. Until you hired the interns and ruined it!
Corporate IT is fun!
Oof, I hope they pay your bar tab.