Tag Archives: paper

Thanks for nothing…

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Due to a particularly long, tiresome meeting today I had papers with margins filled with good ideas – blog topics for days. Once I wrote them down, I promptly forgot about them because, after all, I wrote them down and didn’t need to memorize them. That would be entirely true if I didn’t then chuck my folder with all those margin notes onto a back corner of my desk and then promptly grab my keys and run for the door at the end of the day.

So here I sit with plenty of good ideas locked 20 miles away and utterly incapable of dredging any but the fuzziest recollection from my fragile human memory. This is what happens when I can’t take notes on my phone like a normal person. Yet another reason we should embrace modernity and cast aside the forest of yellow legal pads inhabiting my desk.

So that’s it for tonight. It’s the blog that almost was, but can’t be, because I was fool enough to write my ideas down on a dead tree byproduct instead of recording it as electrons… and because I forgot to throw my folder in my backpack on the way out. But I’m blaming antiquated record keeping methodologies rather than my own, perhaps flawed, end of the day closeout procedures.

The only good to come from this is that it means I may not have to have a single original thought for all of next week.

Dull roar…

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The dull roar of the shredder was my companion today. The previous occupant of my desk was apparently something of an old school bureaucrat; bound and determined to maintain hard copies of just about everything – emails, briefing slides, memos, checklists, and all manner of ephemera that go along with spending your life in service to Uncle’s great green machine. The reason I know this is that since I moved in a full file drawer and approximately twenty three-ring binders have been keeping me company here at my desk.

For the last six months I’ve been bound and determined that I wasn’t going to fall into the trap of picking up that mess just because I happen to be here now and he happens to be long gone. That makes about as much sense as going to the dog park and picking up after someone else’s dog. Sure, you can do it, but why would you?

Today, I hit the point of exhaustion – or maybe the point of exasperation – with needing to shuffle around that long forgotten paperwork to get to things I actually need for myself. I attacked the monument to bureaucracy with gusto and was soon rewarded with easily 2000 pages of documentation whose ultimate fate was shredding and ignoble recycling into consumer paper products. Call me crazy but chance of my being called on to produce a 5 year old email addressed to someone else about a project that has been closed out for 4 years seems to be slight at best. It’s almost as if we’d have all been better off if no one had hit “print” in the first place.

And that brings me to my point – I hate paper documents. I avoid them at all costs. When they show up uninvited at my home the first thing that happens is they get transformed into a beautiful PDF, get a searchable name, and then go into the archive for use in the future if it turns out that they’re ever really needed at all. As often as not, that’s the last time human eyes will ever look upon those particular electrons. It’s an approach that’s served me well at home for almost a decade now – virtually making the one lone file cabinet I own obsolete. Now if I could just convince the office that fully digitized documents are better for everyone…

I’m not holding my breath on having any ability to urge the behemoth to step into the twilight of the 20th century so the shredder’s dull roar will likely be my near-constant companion for the next two decades.

A piece of work…

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Without the kind of fanfare that accompanies something like an Apple Watch or iPhone, Amazon rolled out its latest and greatest e-ink reader today. It’s been my experience that people who spend a lot of their time reading are not necessarily the wild, loud, in your face types. That the Voyage showed up lacking in heraldry and great celebration feels almost fitting for the demographic it’s intended to serve.

I haven’t had any hands on experience yet, but the reviews I’ve read tout is as a best in class e-reader. That’s not exactly a surprise considering it predecessors were mostly best in class devices themselves when they arrived. I should go on the record saying that I like my current Kindle Paperwhite. It’s not a tablet. It doesn’t even pretend to be. Its mission in life is to replicate the look of a real paper reading experience as close as possible using an electronic medium. It took me some time to get with the program, but once I did I haven’t looked back. I couldn’t tell you the last paper book I purchased for myself. Having all the books at my fingertips is simply too great a temptation to resist.

If the iPhone is the Swiss army knife of consumer electronic communications, surely Kindle is the Ka-Bar equivalent – a single fixed blade designed to do exactly one thing and to do it with savage precision. I have no doubt that the new Voyage lives up to Amazon’s well deserved reputation building the kings of the e-reader universe.

I’d have my order in already if it weren’t for one pesky detail – the $199 entry-level price point ($219 if you don’t want built in advertisements). At that price, I’m going to have to sit the upgrade out for the time being. Although Voyage is technically superior in nearly every respect to my nearly two year old first generation Paperwhite that old model is still an incredibly reliable device that’s delivering rock solid performance every day. As much as I want to I can’t find a good enough reason to put it out to pasture yet – not even with a $40 Amazon gift card thrown into the mix.

When I’m willing to hang on to two year old tech because it’s still that good, you can best believe it’s a piece of work. In the best possible way.

Hard copy…

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With very few exceptions, all of our documents live on one of several network drives available to every employee in the building. I theory that means if ask where something is, I should be able to say “it’s on the Q-drive in the folder titled Big Expensive Project.” Thus armed, a reasonable person could be expected to go forth and find the file they need. Of course our people aren’t necessarily reasonable… and the concept of a networked drive Dot Matrix.jpgmight as well be a blueprint for a time machine.

I’ve been using a tablet to tote all of my paperwork for the better part of the last year. It’s great. I make changes in a meeting, at my desk, or sitting on the can and whatever I’m working on propagates through the network to my laptop, my desktop, and even my phone. With the exception of a very few things that require, for some inexplicable reason, a manual signature, I don’t need paper. And I don’t want it. Paper is going to get lost. My electronic files are going to get backed up once an hour and then stored off site at the end of the day.

You can, perhaps, understand my level of frustration when an employee, let’s call him Mr. Turtle, comes to me with a hand illustrated packet that explains one of the new concepts we want to put in place. Seriously. He had hand drawn graphs and had cut sections out of other documents with scissors and taped them into his “presentation.” Literally. Cut. And. Paste. I’m a pretty smart guy, but I have no idea where to even start dealing with that level of ineptitude from a long-serving “professional” member of the staff.

It’s possible that I’m going to have to pummel the next person who comes to me wanting hard copy of something with a ream of 11×17 paper to drive home the point that this isn’t 1870. Everybody doesn’t need a dead tree edition of everything. Actually, almost no one needs a hard copy of anything any more. Of course that would mean that they’d have to figure out how to use the glowing box on their desk for more than a place to stick Post-It notes.

Editorial Note: This is part of a continuing series of previously unattributed posts appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

A clean desk…

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I suppose if you’re an egomaniac, it’s easy enough to confuse your way of doing something with the only actual way of doing that thing. Usually when the boss is out trying to manage by walking around, I make a concerted effort to be on my own walkabout and thereby avoid the three or four random tasks that he wants to focus on that day. Sometimes, though, he’s on me before I can make a clean getaway. Yesterday was one of those days… and led to this exchange:

Boss: What are you doing?

Jeff: I’m reviewing the last twelve monthly reports from human resources to validate year-over-year workload and staffing requirements.

Boss: There’s nothing on your desk.

Jeff: Everything is on the network drive. I’ve got all the data I need on the computer. *gesturing weakly towards my monitors*

Boss: If there isn’t paper on your desk, you’re not doing anything. You’ve seen my desk, right?

Jeff: Uhhh… Yes. I’ve seen your desk.

Boss: Good, then. Make an appointment to talk to me about some-random-other-issue.

Jeff: *Bangs head on desk as boss walks away.*

I’ve increasingly come to suspect that the reason that an employee “goes postal” from time to time just might not be a defect in the employee.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.