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Paperless Office

uneasy

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Joined
May 28, 2003
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502
Computers were supposed to bring about the paperless office, and I was a bit skeptical of that. Those laser printers are still churning out reams of printed reports and presentations.

But today I remember that I actually have a physical mailbox. Remember, paper letters delivered by people? I had three letters dating back to June. Wow, only 3 letters. Then I noticed one was June of 2002! Had it been that long since I checked my mail? I guess so.

So I guess I'm paperless. I have a few manuals printed out, and I take notes in a notebook. That's about it.

Are you paperless?
 
Are you kidding. I oversee maintenance for the equipment in my division. Since the Navy now uses a program to schedule and track maintenance the amount of paperwork I create has tripled. There are reports that I have to print out every week just so they can be signed and then thrown away. All that info is available on the computer for anyone who wants/needs to know, so the only reason I print this stuff out is because I have to force people who have no interest in it to sign.
That goes for most of the paperwork in my office. Pretty much every form/document that I use regularly either has an officially made electronic format or I've created one. It all still ends up on paper because the Navy won't invest in any sort of electronic signature capability. They say it costs too much. Though in the Navy's defense I should add that a lot of the people I work with (especially the older ones) have difficulty with email let alone anything complicated.
 
The paperless office is just down the hall from the paperless washroom.

Stolen from I don't know whom, right after - the secret to originality is forgetting your sources.
 
I remember about 10 years ago we had someone in the lab who printed out their data files as backup. I'm talking tens of thousands of lines of numbers. I remember asking, "what? so if the disk crashes you're going to re-enter all this by hand?" Stoopid.
 
My engineering department in missile defense has tons of documents on the computer: gigabytes worth of it. True, I still print out hard copies for varying purposes (mostly meetings), but the majority of my document work is on the computer. I don't think we'll ever lose paper completely (I have yellow stickies everywhere!) but I know that computers have enabled me to sit in a 10x15 office and look at documents on my computer that would take up a small library if all printed out.
 
Agammamon, that's too bad about the Navy. Large bureaucracies are harder to change. I guess I'm fortunate that my company did invest in electronic documentation and authentication. People remember passing paper around, but we have weaned ourselves off it.
 
I work with an older lady who prints out nearly every one of her emails and files the hardcopies in her filing cabinet
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I was told this week that if I want to save my project related emails into the new electronic paperless project archives, I have to print them then scan them.
 
Not paperless in the book composition business yet. Occasionally I get an author who complains about the amount of paper we use for proofs during composition, but then I remind him that the printer is about to cut down a small forest to print the book.

~~ Paul
 
zakur said:
I work with an older lady who prints out nearly every one of her emails and files the hardcopies in her filing cabinet. :rolleyes: [/B]
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There's a prof in my department who does the exact same thing. I don't think he quite trusts the words on the computer screen; somehow it isn't real unless it's on paper. :)
 
arcticpenguin said:
I remember about 10 years ago we had someone in the lab who printed out their data files as backup. I'm talking tens of thousands of lines of numbers. I remember asking, "what? so if the disk crashes you're going to re-enter all this by hand?" Stoopid.
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I'm not sure about this one. If the data was generated inside the computer, then yes it's stupid. but if the data was logged or captured by hand and could only be replaced by replicating the experiment I would want to have a real copy.

Google on palimpsest archimedes and you'll find a 12th century prayer book that has a greek mathematics text underneath from about 200 BCE. I've got some 160K floppies from an Osborne that are unreadable after 20 years, even if I could find a working Osborne.
 
uneasy said:
But today I remember that I actually have a physical mailbox. Remember, paper letters delivered by people? I had three letters dating back to June. Wow, only 3 letters. Then I noticed one was June of 2002! Had it been that long since I checked my mail? I guess so.

So I guess I'm paperless. I have a few manuals printed out, and I take notes in a notebook. That's about it.

Are you paperless?
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We have robotic mail carts that delivers mail in our research center. I'd say I get on average 2-3 pieces a week, usually junk mail from chemical and lab equipment vendors.
 
Nope, you gotta have things signed still. So you print it out, get it signed, then scan it in, and file the hard copy. Then when a client comes in they can look at their files. It's easier showing them paper than trying to get them all around a computer and show them all the scanned stuff. The computers can crash-blah blah.

I couldn't stand to read everything I need to in a day on a computer screen.

My boss prints out a lot of emails just so she can take them out of the office...easier to keep them with you in a vehicle and throw them out later than try to keep the laptop on 100% of the time for a reference.

It's funny though. We copy every e-mail we send to clients/or clients send us, and paste them in electronic client journals...I also log any other communication there as well...if they phone or we phone them. If they walk in....everything.
 
My work is almost all paperless. I just write down materials needed for the next day on scraps of drywall, 2x4's, etc. :wink:
 
I maintain a document database for a billion dollar construction project. 120,000 documents so far plus all the correspondence about the documents. Each original document is scanned and entered into the database. The originals are filed and never refered to again since it is much easier to find things in the database. Every scanned document gets run through optical character recognition software and every word recovered is indexed to the documents (excluding words line "and" and "the"). We have 20 different ways to search for documents, and the search is fast, even at remote offices around the project. We expect to have a million documents in the system by the time the project is completed (about 2013). Plus a map of the project that can bring up all relevant drawings and documents just by pointing to a spot on the map. It's a pretty neat system, and fun to work on...
 
tedly said:
Google on palimpsest archimedes and you'll find a 12th century prayer book that has a greek mathematics text underneath from about 200 BCE. I've got some 160K floppies from an Osborne that are unreadable after 20 years, even if I could find a working Osborne.
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I got one! I got one! In fact, I got MORE than one! AND they work!
 
Patnray said:
We expect to have a million documents in the system by the time the project is completed (about 2013). Plus a map of the project that can bring up all relevant drawings and documents just by pointing to a spot on the map. It's a pretty neat system, and fun to work on...
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So you'll have one document for every $1,000 spent? And each of those documents cost how much to create, circulate, approve, update, and archive?

~~ Paul
 
Well done Zep. Got to keep the faith alive. They were superb design given the technology.

And they did give us the joke about 'how does a computer manufacturer make a portable nuclear reactor? - Put a handle on it.'

But even so, all those little magnetic domains have faded to black. Oh, well... there was nothing like Archimedes' text on them any way.
 
I haven't had to buy paper for my home computer printer in a very long time. I just bring home some of the huge piles of blank pages that the office printers spew out when people screw up a print job.
 
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