Welcome to our e-office of e-fficiency

posted by Heath Buckmaster on April 20, 2007

I was browsing around our company intranet the other day and realizing just how e-fficient we’ve become. We’ve e-nabled all sorts of applications that allow employees to get their jobs done faster. Over the years we’ve e-nabled choosing your medical provider via the web, checking your payroll statements and tax forms, looking up phone book data on someone in the company, and registering for training classes.

No more do you have to call a medical provider and have them mail you a huge packet listing all of the doctors near your zip code. You don’t have to ring up someone in payroll to have them fax you a copy of your last pay stub. Who presses zero on the phone to talk to the operator any more to get someone’s phone number? And gone are the days of signing my name to a piece of paper to register for a class.

Everything that I need to do my job has been e’d. That is, it’s been converted to web application form so that I can access it from anywhere that my laptop can take me. Convenient, isn’t it? I can be working at home, working in a lab, working at my desk, or even working in a hotel room, and I can decide that I want a new doctor, go online and find one. I’ve moved to a paperless office, where every transaction happens virtually.

So what on earth are all these people printing out every day? I walk down the hall to the nearest printer system and there are entire forests of emails and presentation materials being printed out. I see expense reports, emails, spreadsheets, screen prints, all sorts of things that are supposed to be virtual only. And what happens after they review that email they’ve just printed? It goes right back into the trash. Can’t they just send it to their deleted items or trash folder without going through the middle-man (the printer)?

Why would I need to print out an email? It’s eMAIL! That little e in front of it tells me, “Hey, that’s not paper mail, that’s e-mail. That means I can view it e-lectronically without having to print it out!” Yeah. No. Someone is still printing out their email messages on the printer, preventing me from printing out my expense report receipt. Wait…should I even be printing that out? I transmit my e-xpense reports electronically and my manager approves them electronically, so what am I doing at the printer? You just know that I’m going to throw away that receipt once my expenses are approved, and yet I print it anyway.

Whatever happened to going paperless? I’ll tell you what happened, people started to miss the tangible aspect of holding something in their hands. Don’t you miss those days when you printed something out on your 2 page per minute dot-matrix printer and ran down the hall waving it in the air until you reached the room of the systems administrator, and you flung the paper in their face which showed them that the mainframe system was crashing? Paper had power! Paper was something tangible that said, “Get out of my way! I’m important! I have a piece of paper in my hand that has information on it!”

You have to admit, it’s rather boring to send an email to the systems administrator telling them you can’t log in. Yawn. I don’t even have to stretch a single muscle to send that email, because my fingers robotically press the left mouse button and send it before my brain has even caught up. At this point, printing something out at least gives me some e-xercise! I have to actually get up from my desk and walk down the hall to the printer…that’s more activity than I have on most days when I’m dialed into meetings from 7am-6pm. Maybe using the printer has become the corporate answer to a gym membership.

But this post isn’t about health and fitness in the workplace. This post is about a funny picture I took in the printer room the other day. See below, and enjoy the irony.

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tagged: efficiency, email, paperless office, printers