March 23, 2004

You are on the invidual archive page of Luddites. Click Simon World weblog for the main page.
Luddites

In order to handle my emails I have set various rules to move messages to folders with snappy titles like "Admin", "Mar04" and "Pretend to read later". Usually this system works well. Except for the four to five times a day when the email crashes. The folders get locked and messages cannot get moved to them. This quickly makes the inbox look like a phone directory. The IT guy's response is re-assuring. He tells me that it is a common problem and they're working on a fix. At least, that's what he told me four months ago. Now he just looks and shrugs. The only solution is to completely log out of the email program and log in again. That requires saving everything that's open. It becomes a 5 minute process every time. That 20 to 25 minutes a day. It's a brilliant waste of resources. And it happens company wide. Let's say there are one hundred people just on my floor - that makes 33 1/3 man (or woman) hours a day wasted because of this friggin' email bug. That's just on one floor of one branch of my monolithic company. FIX IT! It's worth the resources to find the solution.

Email has only resulted in more of a paper pile than ever. The printer at work goes no-stop almost all day. Pieces of paper strewn across every desk in the office. Pens go missing with a strange regularity. I'd like to meet the inventor of the paperless office and find out if they actually live on Planet Earth. Or if they live on the same planet as all the other IT people that conspire to make normal working people's lives a misery*.

* To those IT industry readers of this site - by reading this site you automatically prove you are better than all other IT people.

posted by Simon on 03.23.04 at 12:51 PM in the




Trackbacks:

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blog.mu.nu/cgi/trackback.cgi/18537


Send a manual trackback ping to this post.


Comments:

I'm old enough to remember the promise of the paperless office ... and old enough to remember the enormous amount of work I used to get done with a ballpoint pen and an IBM Selectric typewriter. The contrast staggers the mind.

posted by: Frances on 03.28.04 at 12:00 PM [permalink]




Post a Comment:

Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments:


Remember your info?










Disclaimer