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Originally posted by "snoofle" ...
I've been working with computers since the mid 1970s, and thought I'd seen every possible stupid thing users could do. Coffee cups on the PC's cup holder. $20 bills jammed into the slot (floppy) to purchase stuff on the internet. Pretty much everything featured on TDWTF. Nothing could surprise me anymore. Until today.
A co-worker in another group, upon finishing a presentation, asked me to distribute it to the folks in my department. I told her I'd need six copies. She said she'd get them to me. So far, so good.
An hour later, I got an e-mail from her. Ok, so I'd have to print out six copies myself. Still, so far, so good. Then I opened the e-mail, to find six copies of the presentation attached.
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Maybe it was a hint, like "I'm not your secretary, print your own copies if you need them."
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I think there are lots of people that have trouble understanding the relationship between print documents and digital documents.
I worked as a "copy boy" at a law firm a few years ago and saw similar things. Sometimes lawyers would send me a Word doc and ask me to print, say, 500 copies. Sometimes they would send me a stack of 500 pages and ask me to scan them in and e-mail them the PDF. One day, a woman comes down and asks me to scan in a bunch of stuff to make a PDF. I'm happily scanning this stuff until she realizes there's a typo or something in the document. "Luckily," she says, "I've got the Word Doc this stuff came from on this floppy here!" She whips out the floppy and makes the change, then tries to print out the document so I can scan in the new version. At this point I stop here, and explain that Word has a feature where you can convert .doc files straight into PDF form, no scanning involved... The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure 99% of the physical documents sent down to me were from Word files that were printed out just moments before... |
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She was being efficient.
You only had to print each copy once, instead of one document six times. Printing a document six times might wear our the ones and zeros. |
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I'll never forget the day my mom tried to send her first e-mail... She had printed out the Word document, put it in an envelope, written the e-mail address on the envelope and stamped it. The she put it in her floppy drive...
We had a good laugh about that one :) CAPTCHA: bene |
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