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Originally Posted by MaggieScratch
Oh, so do I; but I still think there's a lot of needless paper being produced. (And I mean both pbooks and office documents.)
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I concur. But I've seen rhetoric that parses as "Death to paper!" Frankly, that gives me the pip.
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Speaking of printing out e-mails: in the summer of 2003, I was between jobs, and temped for a couple of weeks at a company where exactly that was part of my job, being, I was informed, someone who "knew about e-mail and the Internet and all that sort of thing." Only the secretaries and a couple of other employees had computers, and they were not networked (mine was running Windows ME. Really). Thus, once or twice a day, I was to dial in to the Internet (!) and pick up the firm e-mail, which was maintained as a convenience for clients who were confused by a company that was NOT reachable by e-mail in 2003. I would print out the e-mails--there was one e-mail address for the whole company, which had about 50 employees--distribute them, and then often type up the dictated return e-mails and send them back. I had been laid off from a dot-com that lasted slightly longer than the 2000ish bubble, so I was in major culture shock, needless to say! Lovely people, and they were really nice to me, but I was happy to get back to the 21st century when I was hired for the job I have now.
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<chuckle>
I saw an article on theRegisterUK, a British IT news site a while back. The owner of a mid-sized British firm had declared "No email!". He had looked at the time folks were spending on email, and declared that that time should be spent on the phone and in person, staying close to the customers, and making sure they
stayed customers. My first thought was "How can you run a company without email?" Then, recalling the time I'd spent on email that should never have occurred, and the problems that would have evaporated had people spoken face to face or over the phone to provide clearer knowledge of what was going on and desired as a response, I thought "You know, maybe he's onto something..."
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I also know of someone (who works for a company that is slowly and inexorably marching toward the paperless office) who dictates memos and has his assistant type them up and send them out as PDF attachments to e-mails. Why can't she just type it as an e-mail in his name and skip the middle step? I don't know. He likes memos.
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It hasn't occurred to him that the same text can be part of the mail body rather than a PDF attachment?
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I started out my work history as a temp secretary back in the days when we typed paper memos on IBM Selectrics (and knew we were working for a classy operation if we had the self-correcting models). To change your font, just change your ball!  In one of those temp positions, I had to make copies of each memo for employees who sat literally next to each other, plus a file copy, plus two copies to be three-hole punched and put into binders, in case anybody lost their copy of the memo. So yes, as someone who was intimately involved in the production of paper at one time, most modern offices produce considerably less paper these days. But there are older folks who cling to the old ways, even in offices with the latest in technology.
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I've encountered folks for whom the issue is status. Think of the old Mandarins with foot long finger nails. They had those as evidence of their status. It made it impossible to do much with their hands, but that was the point: they had servants to do the manual stuff for them.
I've encountered folks who don't have a computer or do their own email -- "I pay people to do that
for me!". And I've seen cases of companies jumping on the bandwagon when the CEO does. Kinda hard for a VP to resist when his boss does it.
I worked for a bank years ago, and was deeply amused at a story one of the bank's IT folks told me about a demo he had done of some new technology they were working on for an audience of SVPs and EVPs. After the demo, one of the senior execs lingered behind, and said "You said X in your briefing. Does that mean I can do
this?", and sat down at the keyboard and did something quite technical. He wasn't about to demonstrate that knowledge in front of the group, for fear he'd get branded a techie, and no longer considered a possible replacement for the CEO some day.
Still a fair bit of that attitude about.
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Dennis