Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I'm a moderate in this debate. I seek electronic books as an additional format, and not a replacement for paper.
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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.)
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.
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.
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.