Be Excellent To Each Other

Wow. That's... Wow.

In Mrs Grim..'s new job (woohoo!) for any paperwork she has to print out a Word doc with the correct template, write in the boxes, and hand it to the admin team who type it up.
Hyper belm.

I told her to type it into template, print it out, and hand it to the admin team.

That's a double wow right there.

Oh, and the network drive has no directory structure. At all. It's the 'z' drive and all files live in the root.

I'd love to see her thought process on that one.

“I need to get this digital file from my computer to another. I guess crossing over into the physical world should be my first step…”

It is my goal to never print anything and will attempt to extol the virtues of electronic options to anyone who may benefit.

My goal is sadly often scuppered by idiots. Usually it's because a signature is needed. Because that's a secure way of doing things.

For expenses claims, our form must be signed in ink. Any that aren't are instantly rejected.

I do find proofing documents easier on paper than on screen however, so do end up covering my desk in tons of printouts.

I once had a form that needed to be faxed with a signature. I filled in the box with gibberish text and faxed it off. When they queried it, I told them it was my signature, scanned in as a jpg, then encrypted for security reasons. They said 'Oh, OK then'.

You are the wind beneath my wings.

Had to go to a talk about "finding work". it started late and went on for 45 minutes of woman reading from powerpoint slides. On one of the slides, the %ages added up to 112%. Waste of a drive to Oxford and back.

He farted on your arms?

You should have called me and we could have gone for lunch/coffee.

I won't take this personally.

Mrs B's company print everything out. All emails come through the secretaries, who print them out and put them in the relevant people's in trays. Once an hour the secretaries walk around and distribute the out trays to the relevant in trays. There is no digital organiser, they have diaries. When someone asks a secretary to, "put that in X's diary." They walk to X's desk and write it in their diary.

One upside of that system - it saves faffing around with Outlook's unfriendly calendar-sharing functions.

We're all linked into a Google calendar at work, and it works like a charm. It syncs straight to my phone and gives me alerts for important things.

It really does beggar my belief how some office staff are able to ignore the latest technology with impunity. If any of our other staff tried that they'd probably be fucking sacked, by some email-printing mongtard.

No, this is the entire office, it is the company policy. the owner doesn't like technology as he think it detracts from social interaction, so has instigated this policy.

They are also not allowed to use the lifts, as "people don't talk in lifts" so they have to use the stairs as people apparently talk more on stairs.

Every Mon, Wed, Fri they have lunch cooked for them buy the company and everyone has to down tools and go and eat at long tables, and talking about work is frowned upon.

The rest of it is bonkers, but this isn't necessarily something I disapprove of.

Most of my clients I invoice via emailed .pdf's. This client I'm about to invoice always has a footer on their emails saying, "Consider the environment, do you really need to print this email out?"

So I can email a .pdf of my invoice, but if I want to get paid I have to print out two copies of their commissioning form sign them both and send them back via snail mail. Every fucking time I shoot for them.

If anyone talks about work when the company is out drinking after the first round, they have to buy the next round.

That's brilliant!

I have a PNG of my signature that I _{scanned in} and paste onto the word document before PDFing it. It then gets printed out anyway but hey.

She really likes working there, it is far less stressful than her last role, and everyone knows each other and the atmosphere is loads more friendly because of that.
Granted the technology is bad aspect is a bit on the extreme side, but the concept of communication is not one I disagree with.

When I worked for the council I remember a circular email requesting that we add such a message to all our emails (I didn't). Someone left a copy on the main printer.

Talking of 'do not print this email', this is a thing of beauty. Grim... beware

Uh-oh.

Also, this:

It's called a 'Centerline Wake', and is not entirely understood, but seems to be mainly caused by the ship mixing up the surface which does 2 things.
1: It pulls up & disperses pollutants (like oil) to the surface again and reduces the surface tension, and
2: It introduces loads of tiny bubbles underwater that take a while to disperse, in the mean time the drive small circulating cells just under the surface. These cells (driven by the rising bubbles) can persist for 5-10 minutes after the boat has passed, and the circulation keeps the bubbles from all rising at once.
These two effects prevent the formation of stable 5-10 cm wavelets, that give regular undisturbed water its more cloudy appearance. the bigger the ship, the deeper the cells & disturbance, the longer it lasts.

These are also of great interest to ship tracking radars, as this give a long & easily distinguishable 'Narrow-V' wake behind ships that can be seen for 1km or more from satellites, much more easily than the ships themselves.

A friend of mine argued with his boss that putting that "consider the environment. Do you need to print this email?" line on his signature actually wasted paper.

Because it was 1/10th of a line of A4 (for example) for every 10 pages he printed, one extra would be wasted by the repeating environment line and again, this was in a company that printed a lot of stuff.

Huh, that was quick.

If you add up all the times it's emailed, it also takes up hard drive space. Fucking masses of it, I would imagine.

One of the documents I was handling recently for a case file was an email conversation between 3 people. Each time, there was the confidentiality disclaimers and signatures on them. They took up more room than the contents of the email itself.

And they make things really difficult to read.

Oh, fuck yes.

I agree... didn't Ass Crud 2 come out this year as well? Is the 4th scheduled for Easter?

Ours repeatedly adds them to the very bottom of the email trail, which makes it even more pointless.

I prefer letters.

Well thought out, nicely typed letters. Letters take time to prepare, in my experience this means that people tend to think more about the content, the structure and the point they're trying to convey.

I genuinely hate emails, people have stopped thinking about what they're writing and the implications of the what they're quickly sending out. By cc'ing every man and his dog they believe that they are covering their arses, the accountability becomes diluted. My inbox is 90% shit people want me to know about so when they fuck it up they can tell me I knew about it, 5% changes to company procedures and the remaining 5% is genuine correspondence related to my work.

It's all too easy and it drives me mad.

If someone's taken the time to write a letter it's usually becasue they got something to say.

Dear The Egg,
I agree wholeheartedly.

Yours sincerely,
The 1990s.

What do people wear when they go out in London? I don't want to look like Paddington fucking bear.

Also, is it best to get the tube to Oxford Circus, then walk to Jerusalems, or change and go to Tottenham court road and walk? This would be around 5-6pmish.

In my profession it would be the 1890s

Hah, get out.

It was almost exactly a year ago, so I hope they've done a good job. It seems to be tweaked mechanics, new story and multiplayer, though, so a lot of texture- and model-work has been re-used. I'm fine with that, as long as it's fun.

From what I've read, this is Ass Crud 2.5, not 3.0.

Yes. It's set in the same place, continuing the same story involving the same people. As long as they haven't fucked up, like Crackdown 2, I'm fine with it.

Speaking as someone who was enjoying Fallout 3.5 until his PC carked it, I agree.

Disagree strongly. Remember, F3 never happened.

You need a shirt and tie to be allowed in - I thought that was in the thread? And no trainers.

As for the tube, walk from Oxford Circus.

Okay, I just choke-slammed someone in Assassin's Creed. Well worth whatever I paid for it already.

You need to wear shorts, a string vest and a shirt jacket.

And walk from Oxford Circus.

You need to wear a dark blue duffel coat, a yellow trawlerman's hat and a red wellies. Wait at Paddington station for someone to meet you.

You need to wear your mum, and get the bus from stratford

See you in a couple of hours.

I wonder what he'll be wearing...
Photos later