when terrible work systems become sacred

by Alison Green on October 17, 2024

I once worked for an organization where, years before, an IT person had created a database in an obscure coding language. He was long gone and no one knew how to make changes to it but the CEO loved it so we weren’t allowed to replace it, despite it being central to our work.

Nearly every office seems to have at least one broken/outdated/dysfunctional object, software, or process that Cannot Be Changed, no matter how inefficient. Examples shared here in the past include a lone employee grandfathered into being allowed to use WordPerfect … a team that refused to file anything in a central location … and some absolute chaos that resulted when a new phone system changed up the speed dial.

Let’s discuss the untouchable but inane things you’ve seen at work. What was the problem, what was the reason it couldn’t be changed, and what was the impact? And if it ever did eventually get changed, what happened?

You may also like:
{ 897 comments }

{ 897 comments… read them below }

  1. boop*

    All digital records must also be kept in hard-copy and may never be destroyed. We pay through the nose annually for both digital and physical storage space even though we have robust physical backups. Our founder is convinced that one day tech will stop working and we will need the hard-copy records to survive. We have warehouses(!) full of paper records going back decades and no-one, as far as I know, has ever had to look at a hard-copy record in the last 20 years.

    1. amoeba*

      Wasn’t quite as bad as that, but I did inherit a *lot* of paper archives from my predecessor, including heaps of printed out e-mails and stuff like that. Also things like receipts of train travel to a conference he had attended 20 years ago (filed neatly in the folder relating to the scientific content of said conference, of course!)

      Unfortunately, I was also the one charged with digitalisation of our paper archives when we moved to a new building. Although it was also somehow cathartic to finally be allowed to basically trash all of it… (the important things were scanned and kept digitally. That was… a very small proportion.)

        1. Gary Meyers*

          Oil &Gas Co in Houston in the late 80s. Merged with (bought) another company. I worked for a service company that managed the first company’s physical records. Buyers had non-petroleum-background contractor “consolidate the yards of paper well-log files.” Many of these had been worked over and marked up in colored pencil by geologists to “interpret “ the geology/data. A lot of value-add.
          They were very proud of how much room they saved (this was pre-digitization step.
          I asked how they decided what to save.
          “Oh, we just kept only the clean copies.”

          1. Seeking Second Childhood*

            My heart sank.

            I can see what happened – not defining the “final” copy. If only someone had checked their plans & progress more carefully the first days/weeks!

          2. Jim Tuck*

            “Oh, we just kept only the clean copies.”

            That got everyone in a competitor’s archival division walked. They’d been throwing out all the marked up contracts from negotiations and often even the final signed copy because they had, and I quote “been scribbled on”.

            And the company only discovered this when they were sued.

            Thank $deity that they’d never actually thrown anything away. While Iron Mountain handled both their archival and shredding, putting things into an archive box with archive box and writing SHRED in marker on top didn’t result in their destruction, only that they got put on a shelf with all the other boxes marked SHRED.

          1. TL*

            You laugh, but in the early days of the web, that was a thing. It made some sense in a this-new-thing-isn’t-as-useful-as-paper sort of way.

            1. Librarian of Things*

              Just yesterday, I weeded a book entitled Consider the Source: A Critical Guide to 100 Prominent News and Information Sites on the Web by James Broderick. This delightful 2007 book discussed the content of the “top” sites you might want to use online, from Al Jazeera to Alternet to Yahoo News. Why you want to visit, what biases they might have, what their shortcomings were. I laughed heartily at the description for WhiteHouse. gov, which said something very like, “a note of caution: websites may change over time; this one will change in January 2008;” probably they meant 2009 after the inauguration, but, really, “websites may change”!

            2. iglwif*

              Plus you never knew when a site would just up and vanish.

              I used to work as a copyeditor, and I secretly loved when my authors had printed out the websites they used in their research because that meant when I asked questions like “hey, this link doesn’t work anymore, when did you access it and can you verify this quotation?” they could actually answer!

              1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

                When official organisations cite websites in my line of work they do so with a “printed” (ie print to pdf) date stamped copy, so that if the website changes there’s a record of what they were referring to when they cited it.

                People are finding now that their cherished links to eg Wayback Machine are suddenly broken and you don’t know when you lost them. Paper tends to become illegible more dramatically than that.

              2. Seeking Second Childhood*

                The vanishing can be painful. Habit Hacker… Crazy Aunt Purl… a corporate resource that would doxx me…

        2. Dust Bunny*

          When I first started my current job almost 20 years ago, we were still collecting newsletters from various relevant organizations. Except they had started to change from print to email-only. And the emails were not formatted to print. I could not get my immediate supervisor to understand this and it was absolutely maddening.

          When she retired and we got a new department head one of the first things he said to me was, “That’s insane. Stop doing that.”

      3. FricketyFrack*

        One of my former coworkers was like that. When she finally decided to retire, our boss told her to stop taking on new work and to spend her last month-ish focusing on finishing everything up and cleaning out her desk. She did not do that. When my boss and I went to clean out her desk, we found stuff like printed emails about scams from 1999, printed emails about procedure changes from the early 2000s that had long since changed again, printed chain messages with notes she’d written about being concerned and wanting to follow up on them, and so on. PRINTED EMAILS EVERYWHERE.

        It was a nightmare and I seriously considered setting the whole cubicle on fire.

        1. And...uh...Abraham Lincoln*

          Oh lord, I had to help clean out desks from the Before Times because my job moved to a new building during the pandemic. One person had, I swear, printed copies of every policy she had ever looked at, every email she’d ever received, every timesheet she’d ever filled out…there must have been THOUSANDS of papers in her desk drawers. She’s an exhausting person to deal with in general, so I may have done some chortling as I tossed everything into either the shred or trash bins.

          1. Schnookums Von Fancypants, Naughty Basic horse*

            As someone who uses “BobGhenghisKhan” as their Ebay name, can I just say I love your screen name?

            1. And...uh...Abraham Lincoln*

              Thank you! I thought about going with Herman the Kid or Maxine of Arc, but it always makes me giggle when he gives up at Abraham Lincoln.

        2. Mustard the Cat*

          Oooohhh, please do a post on weird things we’ve found when cleaning out someone else’s desk. I’ve got stories.

          1. Don Quixote, man of Tuchanka*

            I second that! Have a story to share about The Lady Who Didn’t Understand Staplers.

            1. Crooked Bird*

              Somehow I read that as The Lady Who Didn’t Understand Spiders.

              Now I want BOTH those stories…

              1. BarredOwl*

                I hope this isn’t a spoiler, but maybe you’d enjoy reading Adrian Tchaikovky’s “Children of Time”. It could be described as being about a lady who learns to understand spiders.

      4. RVA Cat*

        Yeah it was an ordeal having to clean out my dad’s paper hoard when prepping his house to sell. Retired CPA…*sigh* I filled an entire supercan-sized shred bin.
        Now to haul out the paperwork accumulating in his senior apartment.

      5. allathian*

        Same! When I started my current job, my then-coworker kept extensive paper archives, like two filing cupboards of it. When she quit, she got rid of a lot of it but not all.

        It survived two office moves within the same building. Last year we switched to hotdesking when we went officially hybrid and my current coworker and I realized that we hadn’t looked at anything in the archives since he was hired 10 years ago! It was a huge reliefi to trash all of it. We probably put more in the secure bin than was strictly necessary, but our manager said that it was a waste of time to check every file separately. Even so, it took half a day to throw everything away.

        My former coworker printed nearly everything out because she hated reading from a screen. Most of it she trashed immediately, but even so, her archive grew and grew.

        1. Anon Teacher*

          Teachers are some of the WORST offenders – because what if that online resource isn’t there in the future? better print it out and keep extra copies…it’s useful, to a certain point, but it can easily become a nightmare vortex.

          I once took over from a teacher who had been in the same position – and, more crucially, in the same physical classroom – for almost thirty years. Her present to me? Five separate filing cabinets FULL of old handouts. Fortunately, only two of them were the massive five-drawer filing cabinets…but I still had 20+ drawers absolutely stuffed with old papers.

          And of course I’m also a teacher, so I’m more or less constitutionally incapable of recycling things without at least looking at them, because what if they’re actually useful? So the cleanout process was, er. Not speedy.

      1. Madame Desmortes*

        As an institutional-repository manager, I had an “archivist” (he wasn’t really; he had the title despite zero archival training formal or informal, which tells you something about that library) request to archive an institutionally-important email announcement.

        Which was fine. Happy to.

        What was less fine was that what he wanted me to put in the IR was a scan of a printout of the email. It never occurred to him to ask me to archive the actual email! I ended up ingesting the scan and adding the actual email (with full headers) on the side without his knowledge.

      1. House On The Rock*

        I was just about to say this! I’d be concerned about working for someone who thinks that when the Apocalypse comes, everyone’s first thought will be how to get the hard copy backups out of storage so we can of course keep toiling away at our professional job!

        1. possibly*

          On the other hand , if you’re unknowingly hacked with ransomware, it would definitely be cathartic to say: no thanks, we’ve got backups.

          1. Orv*

            There probably is a certain subset of vital information that should be available offline. But “offline” in this case just means “in a form not connected to the Internet,” not necessarily on paper.

            1. Antilles*

              Especially not in a “warehouses full of paper records”, because if they’re really making copies of everything, the vital information is likely buried amongst all the trivial information. If nobody’s looked at a hard copy record in 20 years, there’s no way those hard copies are in a well organized fashion that lets people quickly find that vital information.

            2. Kuddel Daddeldu*

              I don’t know exactly how our IT does it, but my personal stuff is backed up according to the 3-2-1 principle: At least 3 copies of the data, on at least two media, one of them off-site.
              In my case: PC copies data to home server every few hours while it’s on, which in turn writes daily backups to my brother’s home server a few hundred miles away.
              The offsite backups are immutable, only adding (not overwriting) files so ransomware can’t encrypt them.
              I feel this is (probably) just good enough.

          2. MassMatt*

            How would you go about even searching, let alone scanning/inputting, the relevant information from literally warehouses (!) of paper?

          3. MigraineMonth*

            This is why you should have offsite *digital* backups that can be restored in case of ransomware/flood/power surge/etc. Not why you should keep a warehouse full of paper. Are you planning on hiring a hundred people to scan and upload it all?

        3. Collarbone High*

          After 9/11, my HOA sent out a letter reassuring everyone that the paint chips indicating the allowable exterior colors for our houses were stored in a secure vault and would not be destroyed in a terrorist attack. Yes, that would definitely be my top concern in that situation…

          2. Ally McBeal*

            I’d be tempted to join the HOA board just to learn the top-secret location of this vault and destroy said documents. Approved paint colors, honestly… this is why I’d rather rent forever than buy a house with an HOA. (No offense/disrespect to you, of course.)

      2. I own one tenacious plant*

        This happened to the company I was working with this summer. They were the target of a cyber attack. It meant that all company emails were compromised, I don’t think they could use their main server and it caused chaos. Luckily we were working off an unaffected server, our data was safe but some of our shared files were on Teams and were off limits for months. Not to mention peoples financial info was compromised and resulted in them being locked out of their accounts and I believe loosing money. I love having everything digital and available from just about anywhere but hard copies/backups have a place and there are downsides to having everything on the cloud.

    4. pally*

      “Machines are gonna fail!”
      -Deliverance

      We’re also firmly entrenched in the paperwork jungle too. Cannot convince folks to do otherwise. I’m thinking they never quite forgot Deliverance.

    7. AnonPi*

      Yeah we have to keep (electronic and paper) training records for 75 years (govt). Because you know, someone 70+ years from now may ask to see if I did my training in 2024 to ensure I was in compliance. Don’t know what they’ll do if they find a problem as I’ll be dead by then, but there ya go.

      Every department ships off boxes of paper copies of this stuff to some giant warehouse every year. And just think this is across multiple govt owned facilities – I can’t imagine how many tons of paper we have stored across the US.

          3. AnonPi*

            omg this is hilarious, and the sad thing is more so because I could almost believe someone going this far! :D

      2. Any Given Fergus*

        “Every department ships off boxes of paper copies of this stuff to some giant warehouse every year. And just think this is across multiple govt owned facilities – I can’t imagine how many tons of paper we have stored across the US.”

        That’s really what’s in most those boxes in the warehouse at then end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Being saved for Top Men.

    8. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

      This would have been my dad. When I cleaned out his house to moving him into assisted living he had kept every cancelled check he had ever written since his first checking account in the late 1930’s. Also every paid bill for at least 30 years. When banks stopped sending back cancelled checks he went to the carbon checks and kept all those. I had to promise him I was moving those 3000 miles and storing them at my house. I lied.

      1. RavCS*

        My dad did this as well. He was an accountant. We had copies, sometimes multiple ones, of every tax return from his initial one (around 1950 / 1951,) all his cancelled checks, my grandparent’s check registers (going back to 1930, if not a few years earlier,) business documents concerning things they no longer owned (Florida orange groves, Midwest real estate, etc.) It was kind of fun, but also exhausting to go through all of this after his death.

        1. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

          I had 3 days to pack a 3 bedroom house with full attic and basement with a newborn in tow. Basically everything went into the dumpster except photographs, clothes, books and furniture. It was stressful, but it was somewhat liberating to not have the time to do it correctly. If I had lived nearby I probably would have gone to his house multiple times a week for months.

          2. Cathie from Canada*

            Yes we also found that we had to be ruthless in cleaning out my FILs apartment because we had only a few days to do it. We tossed mounds of stuff – we called a moving company to work with us in the apartment so we could designate which items were to be shipped to our home and which were to be donated to charity locally.
            But we had to check drawers full of envelopes from financial companies when we realized he had been tucking cheques back into some envelopes and forgetting to deposit them.

          3. Overthinking it*

            I shudder! Some of these documents going into “the dumpster” surely had account number, SSNs. . . .please tell me you shredded or burned them before they went in!

        2. Boof*

          I feel like this is a version of hoarding a bunch of toys/collectibles because they might be valuable some day – yeah maybe in a few generations there will be some wild ligation case that all hinges on digging up that one document that proves you paid for ___? But… no I think that’s probably more the domain of speculative fiction and not worth all the time and effort of collecting/storing all the stuff. (plus, who knows, maybe the paper trail actually ends up working against you in the wild speculative fiction scenario!)

          1. AFac*

            Or my mom’s justification for holding onto things: ‘someone found this enjoyable/useful once, surely someone will find it useful again.’

            Along with the associated corollary, usually stated after giving it to someone and expecting them to keep it: ‘why can’t you be that person to find it useful again?’

            1. Overthinking it*

              “Hoarding by proxy “. . . I don’t want it taking up space in my house, but don’t want the guilt of discarding it, so I will transfer it to you, along with associated guilt and/or obligation to store it. (My mother trained me well in sentimentality AND frugality. She knows EXACTLY how painful it is for me to throw away something owned by a deceased loved on or that “might come in handy some day”)

              And yeah, there have been times when I have had to go buy something that I ruthlessly got rid of a few years before. It hurts!

              1. goddessoftransitory*

                Yeah: there was an obnoxious Slate article where this woman gave away her books to friends with notes about why they were being “chosen as its guardian.” Like, if it’s important, keep it, but don’t play “pass the hoard.” You can bet I’d read that note, roll my eyes, and most probably pop it in the donate pile.

                It’s one thing to ask first, of course; quite another to assume everybody wants to hold onto stuff for you like a free storage locker.

              2. Zephy*

                The family I married into has a RAGING case of this and my SIL is trying her damnedest to break the cycle. My inlaws have a 3-car garage and about a third of the space is dedicated to stuff that belonged to my husband’s grandpa, who has been dead since 2006. No one, but no one, has even so much as thought about any of that stuff since probably well before 2006. It’s all grimy and heat/humidity-damaged and covered in sawdust and spiderwebs now. It’s a big pile of nasty trash that they can’t get rid of, because it was Grandpa’s.

      2. Seal*

        My mom as well. Knowing she would need to move to a smaller place or assisted living sooner or later, my family tried to get her to downsize. At one point I went through several file cabinets that included old bills and bank statements dating back 40 years. We filled half a dozen grocery bags of paper to recycle; I made a point of getting rid of the file cabinets themselves so she couldn’t refill them. She insisted on having the old bills and statements shredded. Since her town’s annual cleanup day was coming up and included document shredding, we agreed she would take them there. A year later, I found all the bags stashed behind the couch. When I asked her why they were still there, she said she still needed to go through them “just in case”. After that, I made sure everything she was getting rid of was out of the house before I left, even if I had to take it with me.

        1. LostCommenter*

          I had to help my mother clean out the house after my father’s death a year ago and I couldn’t trust her to just throw out what was junk. I couldn’t even trust her to leave stuff in the bin after I put it there. So me and my brother packed up everything she didn’t have space for and moved it across the city to my house in a weekly ritual which ended just recently. I then got the chance to put stuff in the bin, give it away, or if it was worth something, sell it on marketplace. she had newspapers from 1994 between her stuff. I assure her everything found a home, didn’t tell her the bin was a home too.

      3. goddessoftransitory*

        I do keep paper copies of bills, but I pay online and shred them every year. I do like having physical backup because of wonkiness with systems (and actually did use my newspaper bill to prove I’d paid when their system tried to cancel my subscription!) Who wants hard candy?

        2. I Have RBF*

          I have files going back at least 20 years, maybe more. If I keep them at all, I want to just scan them, then shred them, when I downsize. We shred a lot of stuff, and have gone through at least two shredders in the last 20 years. If I was really smart, I would burn it all to a DVD by year, or maybe decade.

      4. ASD always*

        My mum has bags and bags of receipts, bills, and bank statements, so she can reconcile them. Which is absolutely absurd, but now that she’s retired she’s at least actually doing it and then shredding them (after updating her spreadsheet of “life events” where necessary). It would be a lot easier to declutter the house if she’s just ship the whole lot off with a shredding service, but who am I to question what she finds fun?

      5. Grenelda Thurber*

        I agree totally that there’s no need for anyone to keep 30 year old cancelled checks and their ilk, but every now and then it crosses my mind that paper will last longer than any current digital media. Tapes, CDs, hard drives will eventually degrade and fail. Eventually there won’t be any technology left that can access them, even if the data on them lasted forever. But we have books that are hundreds of years old that are perfectly legible. Heck, we still occasionally find old scrolls made of sheepskin buried in a cave for a couple thousand years that we can still read. This is really more of a philosophical musing I suppose. The amount of data we produce these days is staggering and 99.99% of it will never interest anyone again, but I do wonder what archeologists 5000 years from now will never know. I keep paper copies of my tax returns, for my own amusement really, they’re a sort of “history of me” that’s sometimes interesting (to me), and they don’t take up much space. I don’t expect anyone else to ever keep or care about them. I swear I’m not a hoarder, I get great satisfaction from shredding my husband’s business records as soon as the legally mandated record retention dates pass.

      6. Love me, love my cat*

        I would have loved seeing a few of those old checks, though! What was his rent/mortgage back then? In the 60’s? 80’s? I bet in the 30’s he wrote checks for things we never use today. Buggy whips, anyone? Lol. But once the initial glee of these discoveries wore off, it would be replaced with terror at the thought of all the kindling I was sitting in the middle of.

    9. Delta Delta*

      My husband is an attorney and his office had paper files going back to the 1960s. There was a move to sort and digitize them and it was taking forever because it was getting done bit by bit. Then there was a horrible catastrophic flood that took out 180 filing cabinets and although it was awful it also took care of a lot of the storage issue. People got over the “but we have to save this paper forever” pretty quickly when it was under several feet of mud.

      1. DEJ*

        One of the latest decluttering tricks is ‘what would you do if this item were covered in poop?’ Under several feet of mud is a great version of that.

        1. PubIntAtty*

          A firm I worked at had a bad habit of keeping every scrap of paper. They had been in the same building for like 50 years, and their lease included full use of the basement for storage. Lease ends and we have to move to offices with finite storage. I spent three months going through the paper equivalent of the vault at end of Raiders of thr Lost Arc determining what we were required to keep (about 1% of it) what should be returned to former clients and what to shred and pitch. Since then I have worked 100% digitally.

          1. Joana*

            Did you find the Ark of the Covenant in there, and if so, were you required to keep it, return it, or throw it away?

    10. She of Many Hats*

      One good way to reduce the paper hoard is to get the company lawyers on the case (pun intended) because if the record or file exists, it can and probably will be pulled as part of discovery if the company is in legal trouble. If the company demonstrates an existing and up-to-date destruction process for records, they are protected from ancient records biting them in the butt in court.

      1. Edwina*

        yes, this! A few jobs so, the company was as concerned, if not more concerned, about getting stuff deleted when the expiration date arrived than they were about retaining stuff. They did not want anything on a legal hold if it didn’t need to be.

      2. MassMatt*

        This can work both ways, for and against retention, depending on the industry and the conservatism of the attorney. In my industry (finance) it’s often considered a good idea to retain records longer than required in case of customer dispute, as well as to document all client contact. In my partner’s field (biotech/pharma) old records could be drawn into discovery in a fishing expedition re: patent disputes, so the rule there is often to destroy as early as possible, as well as avoid leaving a paper trail in emails etc for some subjects.

      3. Anonymous Tech Writer*

        On the other hand, my two “go to the files” moments each saved my company from a $250k+ lawsuit.

        Which is why we tried to get time or funding to scan … ha. Corporate disabled scan-to-USB and refused us funding. Then we lost space and were ordered to discard a set of cabinets. (All documents of one type including materials from before our standard PDF archive began. And then of course we got questions about old product from Tech Support.)

        We’re back to trying to get funding to have archive service scan the stuff in the other set before THAT is summarily recycled.

        I think many people at Corporate come from industries with a much shorter life time than architecture/infrastructure.

    11. Her name was Lola*

      In my state, agencies who handle adoptions have to keep a paper record of it forever. My agency, and a prior one I worked for , are both over 125 years old. There is lots of paper stored at both places.

      1. Jam on Toast*

        Legal documents and government documents are a different kettle of fish. There are real reasons to keep those. We had to settle my grandmother’s estate a few years ago, and there were questions about the title and ownership of some sections of family property that had changed hands between family members a couple of times over the years. We were able to get a copy of my late, long-dead great-aunt’s 1979 will because it had been correctly stored by the lawyer who wrote it.

        And as someone who does archival research as part of my job, I get how frustrating it is to deal with aimless paper hoarders, but those “day-to-day” papers are vital and fragile resources. Historians and archivists want the old contracts, and the business letters and the daily ledgers saved because they have vital information about ‘then’ in them. Once they’re gone, they’re gone forever.

        1. Mad Harry Crewe*

          But there’s no mechanism for getting them from where they are (some old person’s house, being cleaned out by their overwhelmed and busy children) to you.

        2. Banana Pyjamas*

          Agreed. So many times having access to historical records has enabled me to do my job. Even in a job where I find value in retaining these old records, I have seen people retain records we really shouldn’t be, usually because they are the domain of another department.

          I can think of some extreme cases like whole houses being moved, or land splits missed from the 1890s, BUT there are fundamental day to day things the state has changed over time. Having the old records allowed us to pivot with those changes. A good example is effective age. At one point the state said after x years the additions take on the age of the original structure, and structures over a certain age should be recorded as “Old”. Now we are supposed to use a weighted age, which we wouldn’t be able to do without the old records. Then the computer systems the state has approved require a number in year built, so we can’t enter “Old”.

          I will also say, Indiana showed during Covid nothing will move assessment due dates, so yeah, there at least physical records would be more necessary.

          With government there’s also Freedom of Information considerations. The public has a right to records, so we have a responsibility to retain.

    12. Ripple*

      One of the reasons I left my last job was because it was clear that filing and organizing paper files would be the bulk of my job even though my job description and type of role (at other similar companies) would not have included this type of work at all. There was fear from management that paper was the only secure method and even when there was flooding and some files weee damaged, they could not be convinced that secure electronic storage was needed.

    13. Fíriel*

      Sadly if you handle truly important records (legal or govt. documents) your founder is right that paper records are vastly more reliable. ‘tech stops working’ may sound silly, but think how many forms of tech have stopped working in our lifetimes. My work laptop wouldn’t be able to access digital records stored on a standard USB without additional assistance, much less those on a floppy disk. Think how many things that would have seemed permanent when they were digitized have been lost to digital decay (everything ever made to run on flash, for example) and cybercrime (the British Library’s entire digital infrastructure). I’m much more likely to be able to read a book from 1895 than my computer is to be able to access digital material from 1995.

      1. TM*

        Hm, that’s not necessarily the case these days. Physical media can be destroyed by mould, floods, fire (the media company whose entire pre-60’s(?) archive going up in flames – movies, recording masters – sorry, can’t remember the details), earthquakes, civil unrest. Think of how many books were lost when the Cotton library burned down, because he had hunted down as many copies of rare manuscripts/books that he could find and put them in one place – some were all the only extant copies of an item – all went up in flames. Some, one item was rescued and then water-damaged after being tossed in snow.

        Sure, if physical media exists, then it can be easier to read. But then you need to be able to consume/use it. These days, there is a LOT more consideration given to data redundancy and migration. People are now aware that technology changes, so if something needs to be kept, any replacement system must have a way of importing that data. You can’t beat data kept in multiple, distributed data centres for resiliency.

        1. But Of Course*

          There have been several significant vault fires but you’re almost certainly thinking of the Fox vault fire that quite literally destroyed entire careers because all works by that director or starring this actor were destroyed when the silver nitrate went up. Many more actors lost significant portions of their careers – Theda Bara I think has only fragments remaining, and Tom Mix lost about 90% of his movies.

          By comparison, the 1965 MGM vault fire was mild; while many films were lost completely, they had fewer only-copies in the vault. The 2008 Universal fire didn’t lose any movies (though an entire amusement park ride was destroyed) but The NY Times claims that thousands of original audio recordings were destroyed; Universal has never confirmed that.

        2. ThisOne*

          In Cotton’s defence, he didn’t have the option to digitise.
          Some fascinating work going on now to ‘read’ some of the damaged works

        3. Fíriel*

          People are aware of how much technology changes, but what they aren’t necessarily aware of in advance is the need for continual expense and effort to keep up with those changes (like how people making flash-based services couldn’t have predicted losing flash). That’s why just about the most useless way to burn government grants is to spend them on creating a website or digital service. Once that money is gone you won’t have the resources to upkeep it and it’ll be completely inaccessible to everyone in 5 to 10 years (it’s easy to find hundreds of examples of these). This is why a bunch of my digital archiving work in college was about handling these kinds of born-digital preservation problems. I’m always reminded of the stat that over 35% of webpages that existed in 2013 are inaccessible today (even services like the WayBack Machine are imperfect – this week has shown exactly how fragile that is!) And that’s not even getting into all the third parties involved, because you can’t really ‘own’ things digitally these days, only subscriptions to them or licences to view them, which can stop working for any number of reasons over which you have little/no control.

    14. Lydia*

      I have seen this firsthand, and it makes NO sense and is so frustrating. PS Somebody needs to take a closer look at how much money the US DOL spends on physical storage at Iron Mountain. Because it’s probably a LOT.

    15. recycler*

      I think I cured my office of that. We’re not the office of record for most of our files, and we have retention schedules for the files we are supposed to keep. I cleared out SO MANY files when I started! And I don’t keep the digital ones past the retention period either. Muahahaha.

    16. Orv*

      My workplace keeps encouraging us not to keep paper copies, but then tightening quotas on our digital storage and telling it it’s “not for archival documents” as our vendors increase the prices on it.

    17. goddessoftransitory*

      Ugh: every morning when I clock in at work on weekends, the system asks if I want to take a half hour lunch (I do.) When I enter that, the printer prints out “GOT is taking half hour lunch” on a full sheet of paper. That’s all that’s on it. Wastes the paper every weekend for absolutely no reason, records or otherwise–the system logs it electronically, just like you’d think it would.

      1. Love me, love my cat*

        Someone, somewhere back in the mists of time, checked the box in the system telling it to print that paper. The solution is probably just getting that box unchecked. Good luck with that. Lol.

      2. Joana*

        The time clock at work gives us the option of printing off a tiny slip of paper, from the same sort of paper we use for receipts, whenever we clock in, clock out, go on lunch or come back from lunch. I usually do it when I go on lunch just so I can remember what time I went. Some other coworkers just automatically choose the option to print it so you’ll see little slips of paper saying so-and-so clocked in at this time, went to lunch at this time, came back from lunch at this time, and/or clocked out at this time just covering the printer.

        Don’t really understand why they’d choose the optional printing choice if they’re not gonna take it with them for something but okay.

    18. Hush42*

      About 8 years ago I moved into an AR/AP role when our previous person semi-retired. The only duty she kept, 2 days a week, was collections which was completely fine with me. One of the processes I took over from her was that I would enter the invoices we received in the mail into our ERP system, then I would have to file them in a filing cabinet in her office. When we paid invoices each week (digitally, through our ERP system) I would have to print out the list of all the invoices we paid and then go pull those invoices from the filing cabinet in her office and re-file them in the larger filing cabinets in the file room. This process took me hours each week and was completely inane. I lasted about 2 months and then went to my boss and told him that this process was ridiculous and that I was just going to file them all straight into the file room.
      Previous AR person person was aghast because “how would we know which invoices are unpaid?” *Then* about a year later our ERP system got an update that allowed us to attach the files directly to the invoice record in the system and I just started shredding the physical copies. Her response was “but what if the system crashes and we lose all that data?” My bosses response was “If that happens that we have *much* larger issues than AP invoices and our systems are backed up in like 10 different places” mine was “What if there’s a fire and all the physical copies are burned up?” She did not appreciate either response.

      Granted this is the same person who told me that the owner was spending *far* too much money on expanding the business to neighboring states and there is *plenty* of business in the city where our headquarters are. We have more than doubled the size of company in the intervening years so she was clearly wrong.

    20. Elizabeth West*

      MrsBoss at OldExjob did this with duplicate shipping letters. She made me print one that went in the box, and another to file “just in case.” The company was bought out and she and MrBoss stayed on as GMs, then they went their own way.

      The second she left, I threw all the filed ones out and from then on only printed out the actual customer copy. The filed copies filled up two entire lateral drawers. I saved that company a buttload of money on paper.

      1. Rebekah*

        When I was growing up my parents’ business was layers of this. They manufactured one special chocolate teapot for the federal government that was required for certain security applications. No big company wanted the business because it was a giant headache for a relatively small amount of money. The government didn’t need very many, these teapots couldn’t be legally sold to anyone who wasn’t the feds, and they couldn’t be manufactured offshore (see above, security). There were more efficient and cheaper ways for the government to achieve the same result provided by our chocolate teapots but the rules had been established during the cold war and never changed since so….

        Also, in order to make the chocolate teapots there was one irreplaceable machine that was a heavily modified WW2 era shoemaker’s sewing machine. Nothing like it existed anywhere else in the world as it had been customized solely for making these chocolate teapots. The only person we could find to service it was in his 70s with serious health problems. And it was finicky as all get out and broke down if you looked at it wrong. My parents lived
        in terror of it finally giving up the ghost but that stubborn old cast iron beast outlasted the government’s inertia and was still going strong when the feds finally decided that maybe they could use something designed in the last half century and not their super special snowflake chocolate teapot that everyone (not even excluding my parents) hated.

      2. worker bee*

        sigh, that assumes the agency provides adequate direction about when to destroy documents and allows time to do so.

    4. Orv*

      Or people in heavily regulated industries. In the oughts I worked for a chain of mini-casinos that still used VCRs (about 50 of them per property) and VHS tapes (8 hours per tape, so 150 tapes per day per site) because it was what the gaming regulator required.

    6. PubIntAtty*

      So many systems that were built 20, 30, 50 years ago that have been frankensteined to add functions they were never intended to do or just to keep them operational because you will never get funding to buy or develop a replacement. I have two that I use regularly that fully crash at least once a week.

    7. Cat named Brian*

      My friend in state government has to print out his benefits document, sign it all with original signatures. Copy on different colored paper and give certain colors to certain people depending on the type of benefits. Healthcare blue, disability green etc. BTW he’s a remote employee so he has to physically go to the office to turn in his paperwork.

    8. Six Feldspar*

      Occasionally it swings the other way and a department gets too on board with a new app etc too fast – one I work with jumped on the Yammer train and was very excited about having everyone (internal and external) ask their questions in that app’s feed rather than meetings or emails… Their excitement was somewhat premature and misplaced…

    9. bestbet*

      Working on implementing a new finance and HR system at a local government right now. EVERYTHING is sacred. No process could possibly be changed. It’s a nightmare.

    1. CurrentFed*

      To give some more detail:
      My current work requires the use of 7 different software programs. Most of these work on some computers, but not all of them. There are no computers in the building where *all* of the programs work. Some of the programs will work from certain computers but not print from them (and we of course still use a ton of printed forms). Two of the programs are based on Microsoft Access. One of the programs literally has one single computer in the building that it still works on (this program is 95% phased out… but not 100%). Management has said point blank that they’re not committed to fixing issues in most of these programs because “New Program will fix everything!” (We’ve been in the process of implementing New Program for about 3 years now and it’s nowhere close to done).

      1. CurrentFed*

        And another one!

        An employee set up a bunch of excel sheets with macros to streamline our work. Management set that person up as the “owner” of all of the excel sheets, which meant that use of the macros required their employee credentials to be active in the system. When they left, every single sheet broke the next morning.

        1. Morte*

          Also fed we have a Access based till we use that is extremely helpful but no one knows how to update. so when parameters change, which they do occasionally, that part of the tool just isn’t effective anymore (unless it changes back to the previous parameter which has actually happened!).

          1. CurrentFed*

            We re-made all the spreadsheets. Did management learn a lesson about having single points of failure for processes? No.

        3. Media Monkey*

          see also collaborative google sheets/ docs that need to be “owned” by one person’s google login.

      2. Lady Lessa*

        Sounds familiar, except I’m in a lab with old, expensive test equipment that can only be run with antique programs, on computers that can’t be upgraded.

        And, of course, those most familiar with the old programs aren’t available for questions.

        1. CurrentFed*

          I also work in a lab! Luckily most of my equipment programs work on updated(ish) computers (although they’re super buggy!!).

          There was a piece of equipment that, up until a few years ago, could only print to dot matrix printers lol. Luckily not in my department though!

          1. AnonPi*

            OMG also lab, and had to fight at PI about getting rid of our last dot matrix printer because we had no programs/computers left that was compatible. He insisted one day we may come across the need for one. Along with the decades old centrifuge that didn’t work/hadn’t been used in a decade, amongst other broken/out of date equipment. We could have our own hoarders show.

            1. CurrentFed*

              Ha, back when I was in school my PI would request practically every piece of equipment that went up for surplus, all of it broken, missing key pieces, completely unnecessary for our work, etc. He would also complain constantly about how cluttered the lab was and demanded we clear counter space. When we would ask to get rid of all the unused and broken equipment taking up most of the counter space, he would say “no you can’t get rid of that! What if we need it one day!! Anyway, back to how cluttered it is in here…”

              1. LostCommenter*

                At a previous job I had for 7 years, I had equipment that was so broken that it had been written off years before I even started working there, yet I was expected to store all of those things in a cupboard, locked so no one could use it. My manager even added things for me to keep through my years there because he could not get rid of it. When I left, they haven’t tried to find a replacement for me, they were hoping I was bluffing or would stay on after my last day, and it was a very niche position that took them almost a year to fill after my departure. As a gift to that next person, in my last week there I disposed of everything that had been written off in the correct way with the correct documentation. The documentation was left on the desk of HR my last day. I made sure that the next person wasn’t stuck being responsible for a lot of electronic trash.

            2. Nesprin*

              Every lab I’ve ever worked in has had the one sacred piece of antiquated equipment.

              My first lab it was the motion capture system my boss had built for his masters thesis, which ran on Fortran (not the 90’s version of fortran either… the 70’s version).

              My next lab it was the microscope that was the first thing my PI had bought when starting his lab. Optics were terrible and it took up 4x the space of a newer one.

              Next lab it was a cell culture chamber my PI had built with Melvin Calvin (of the Calvin/TCA cycle) for studying glucose flux using radiotracers. (it was still, three decades later, slightly radioactive)

              Current lab it’s the centrifuge from the 1960’s that doesn’t actually have a working speed monitor- you turn it to level 3 and hope that’s near 500g.

            3. The Leanansidhe*

              I have to hold onto an old scintillation counter from the 90s, at my PI’s insistence. It is nonfunctional, needs parts that are nearly impossible to find, and is LINED IN LEAD and requires 4 people to move it a foot. There is a perfectly usable one downstairs. research… whatcha gonna do?

          2. AJ*

            At old job we had an ancient piece of equipment that only worked on the ancient computer with, you guessed it, a dot matrix printer. When the printer started acting shady we started taking screen shots of the monitor and printing it from our phones. Somehow our quality department accepted it.

        2. Tempest*

          We have a couple of electron microscopes that only run on truly ancient computers. We even buy old ones on ebay for backup.

          1. Wolf*

            My lab had a powder mill that only worked with MS DOS. In 2018. It was new. The manufacturer just couldn’t be arsed to upgrade their product, because it sold well enough (because there was no other option if you needed that specific task done).

          2. Jim Tuck*

            You’ll be pleased to find out that you can buy brand new 8086/8088/80286/80386 computers from AliExpress.

            They’re meant to interface with out-of-date manufacturing equipment or for ‘retrocomputing’ and typically run upgraded NEC CPUs instead of the Intel originals, but they’ll work just as well for electron microscopes.

            (I myself used to order Apple II floppy drives on eBay to repair CNC machines)

        3. CurrentFed*

          Just remembered another one…

          There is a piece of chemical dispensing equipment made by a company that went out of business forever ago that I use daily. It’s the only type of this equipment that management will deem acceptable to use with my work. I tried to see if I could find it for sale anywhere to have some backups, but literally the only place I could find this thing was *on display in a museum*. What will I do if my current equipment breaks??? No idea…

            1. MigraineMonth*

              I was thinking daring museum heist…

              Detective: “So this stolen exhibit… was it a valuable painting? Jewelry? Rare fossil? Priceless cultural artifact?”

              Museum curator: “It’s a literally irreplaceable antique.”

          2. ToS*

            Research a couple of backup options now…they may suddenly find that the quality with other options has improved. And sometimes it literally has, if the decision makers have only experienced early versions.

            It’s like that scene/plot element in Hidden Figures when a few of the human calculators saw how to make themselves indispensable when the computer and…punchcards? arrived. The movie is NOT fiction.

            Also, if you keep using existing equipment, their budget is likely artificially low in that area. Labor may be high, as well as lost productivity when The Only Thing is out of commission. My experience? In my area (accessibility)….old buildings, old elevator parts….we have had to have circuit boards fabricated overseas and shipped. Sounds like a time-sucking solution right? It happens. It gets to be more of a time suck when the circuit board gets damaged along the delivery route. They (the old elevators) are in the 5 year plan for replacement. They are not inherently unsafe, they just need more upkeep. The “unsafest” time for elevators is when they are stuck between floors (which is not the quirk for ours) and may suddenly move – use the emergency phone.

        4. Laura*

          I feel like labs could be their own thing. When I started there was one study protocol where the reagent specified had been discontinued. We had a bunch of it in storage, but it had expired years ago. I was told to use it anyway. I kept bringing it up and pushing for a replacement but the people in charge kept ignoring me until we were on our very last vial. Cue panic!

          1. JustaTech*

            Labs are 100% their own thing.
            I lead the clean up of a lab that had essentially been abandoned (the team that used it was laid off so it didn’t get cleaned out). The amount of 90% empty kits lying around, taking up space was astonishing.
            We found a vial in the freezer from 1995, which our VP was super excited about and insisted that we keep.
            We completely filled our recycling dumpster, and filled the trash dumpster twice over.

            Thankfully after a few long-tenured people left I was able to off-load some truly ancient equipment (looked like it was from the 60’s), but we still have some specialty equipment that requires things like computers with floppy drives, or computers running Windows XP. (Sure, that one could be upgraded, but it would require upgrading a bunch of other things and would cost easy $20k, so no, leave the XP computer alone.)

      3. Guacamole Bob*

        We have clunky old piece of vendor-provided software (very niche purpose) that’s built on Microsoft Access, and which breaks with more or less every Access software update. We’re prepping for rollout of the new, modern, web-based software. We asked the vendor what to do in order to preserve access to all the data that lives in the old software (migrating it all would be a mostly-unnecessary pain in the neck), and they more or less said to keep a laptop dedicated to the software that was blocked from ever doing any updates. Good times.

        1. JSPA*

          Pretty standard! And also important to have them siloed because they’re Otherwise, a breeding ground for viruses.Once the operating system (and pretty much every program) are no longer supported.

        2. Dancing Otter*

          Ah, Access databases!

          I did a project once for a major credit card company that was doing “what if” projections using an Access database. My company had built it for them a while ago, so they called us when it stopped working. Fortunately, we had a copy of the empty database, though they’d need to reload data, but they promptly broke that, too.

          Okay, first thing, let’s make a more robust back-end, so you don’t lose all your data when you break the pretty user interface forms. No, no, this billion dollar business doesn’t want to pay for a SQL Server license, let alone anything really good. Just make this one stop breaking.

          Deep breath. What are you trying to do when it breaks? And what exactly do you mean by “broken,” anyway?

          Turned out, the database was written in the then-current version of Access. One of the improvements in that upgrade was allowing longer code statements for all the controls on those pretty forms. You know, the code that tells the machine what you want it to do? Yeah, that.

          But the company’s IT hadn’t actually bought the updated version, even though the end-users were assured, “Oh, yes, everything is absolutely the latest and greatest. Don’t you worry.” (Why yes, my client was a woman. How did you guess?)

          So, every time I fixed it, they opened the database in the WRONG VERSION, and truncated all the code that made it work. Angels and ministers of grace defend us, I was SO glad to turn that one over to my engagement manager to negotiate.

          Talk about penny wise and pound foolish! They could have bought dozens of licenses for what they paid in consulting fees.

      4. goddessoftransitory*

        Sounds like the VA hospital my late dad worked at. SO MANY different computer systems, most ancient and none of which talked to each other but getting approval for upgrades and such was so difficult and costly that nothing was ever done about it. There was a cadre of employees whose only qualification for their job was “can run MS-DOS on a Commodore” because that’s what such and such records were used on.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Not the VA, but another government department involved in healthcare. Our patient intake process currently, in the year 2024 CE, requires health care providers to fill out a paper form and fax it to our department where someone manually keys it in.

          I’m assuming most of the new hires at the providers have never seen a fax machine in person, much less needed one for their jobs.

          1. Cathie from Canada*

            My daughter, a professor in the School of Public Health, has to teach her Masters and PhD students how to use a fax machine because that is what our health system still uses.

          2. Seven If You Count Bad John*

            USA Healthcare FTW!! I had a job for a long time at a patient assistance program that involved exactly this–people had to download our application from the website, print it out, and fax it in. Which went straight to a PDF reader! We never handled a paper fax! But we had to manually retype the information from the PDF back into our data management system (we had two or three at one point for different functions, then they integrated everything into Salesforce.)

            It’s BANANAS.

          3. Lis*

            At time, 2019 so not ages ago, Health Canada requirements were that a certain form be sent by fax. not sure if they still do. So I went to use the fax machine we had in the front office. I try to use it and the fax doesn’t go, repeat for like a week. I talk to IT and it turns out they needed the data connection for something else so diverted all incoming faxes to a computer used by the only person who like ever got faxes but the machine remained in the office, plugged in, so using electricity, through several reorganisation of the office.

            I had to send the form by email to a coworker in the US, I’m in Europe, for them to fax as they had an actual functional fax.

          4. MigraineMonth*

            I should be clear: They can log into our EHR to enter all other protected health information. Even the providers that don’t have a login to our EHR use encrypted email or secure file transfer that meets HIPAA standards. This one form, though, is always faxed.

            Though when they securely file transfer a spreadsheet to us, our process is to have someone manually key in all the data into the EHR instead of doing a spreadsheet import into the database. *facepalm*

      5. Banana Pyjamas*

        This reminds me of an assessment office I worked at. When I started the computers were on various versions of windows because the machines were all had different compatibility. This was an issue throughout county offices. IT swung far in the opposite direction when they corrected and required everyone to have the exact same set up. It would have been helpful to have a third monitor, but I was told no for the above reason. I know one person who eventually got a third monitor, but unfortunately I never did. This actually directly increased the amount of paper I printed, because I need to be able to look at our record, GIS, and the recorder at the same time, and those programs were buggy in small screen mode.

      6. Em*

        I heard all about a single program to rule them all that was coming any day now during my onboarding training 15 years ago. Guess what is still yet to make an appearance?

        1. MigraineMonth*

          On the one hand, I feel like it’s callous for my organization to send out an email announcing they’re replacing the custom system my team built over the last 20 years with an off-the-shelf version (and making my team redundant in the process). On the other hand, it’s definitely the right call to make, strategically: an off-the-shelf version has to be less expensive than multiple full-time software developers.

          Not that it matters, since we’ve been getting these “we’re in the process of selecting an off-the-shelf version” emails every five years for the last 20 years. I really do need to remember to turn my camera off before rolling my eyes whenever it’s brought up in Zoom meetings, though. (Or Teams/Skype/GoToMeeting meetings, since we can’t even come to an agreement which video conferencing software to use.)

      1. Governmint Condition*

        The title of this post uses the word “sacred,” and the body the capitalized phrase “Cannot Be Changed.” But we government employees know that many of these things fall under the category of “Required By Law.”

          1. CurrentFed*

            Unfortunately the cost is a huge reason for this. We’re practically required by law to go with the lowest bidder (which means crappy products), and requesting the budget to update or move to new systems is an absurdly uphill battle :/

            1. MigraineMonth*

              Yeah, I work in a public-sector tech department and all of this is so true.

              We have one business-critical system in an ancient programming language that was originally configured (15 or so years ago) by contractors. Since they didn’t have to maintain the system, they decided the fastest way to make it work was to make changes in the system library. This means we haven’t been able to do a system upgrade in the last 15 years, and the last person who knew how to make changes not only retired but *left the continent* four years ago.

              Since no one will prioritize replacing a system that technically still (mostly) works, my department is playing a variation of chicken I call “drop the hot potato.” We all refuse to learn enough about the system to fix or patch it; if they want any change or fix, they have to let us rewrite that part of the functionality in a modern programming language.

              1. MigraineMonth*

                While the vast majority of users of the old system hate us, there is one employee who loves it and has made it clear he will raise hell if we ever try to take it away from him.

                1. MigraineMonth*

                  “While the vast majority of users of the old system hate it.” Hopefully they aren’t holding grudges against us.

        2. been there*

          Plenty of things are absolutely not required by anyone other than some manager, who hasn’t learned anything new since she started as a filing clerk (and you can’t make her!!!!)

    3. Transit Worker*

      My favorite government IT systems story, about the NYC Subway from 2018:

      “M.V.M.s”—MetroCard vending machines—“at forty stations can’t process debit or credit, only cash.”

      “Now it’s system-wide.”

      “You’re kidding.”

      “I’ll call my guys,” Nugent said. “No fare-beater arrests.”

      Byford called I.T. and put the tech person on speaker. How quickly could they reboot the vending machines? The tech person spoke, haltingly, about a subprocessor and someone named Miguel.

      “What’s that about Miguel?” Byford asked.

      It seemed that only Miguel knew how to log in to the relevant subprocessor and do the reboot.

      “Where is Miguel?”

      He was in a car, apparently, on his way home. He wasn’t answering his cell. He lived in Port Jervis.

      Byford looked at Meyer and Nugent. They shook their heads. Port Jervis was upstate, three hours away.

      “Unbelievable.”

      More calls were made, more cages rattled. Was it really possible that hundreds of vital machines, the main revenue engines of the subways, could be repaired by only one person at the M.T.A.? It seemed so.

      https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/can-andy-byford-save-the-subways

      1. Another fed*

        nope. We have a box of floppy disks in the office, and we can’t throw them out because we don’t know if they contain federal records, but we also don’t have equipment to read them and our agency IT said they’re a security risk that they won’t help with.

        So what are we doing? Packing them up to bring with us on an office move…because we can’t throw them away.

        you can’t make this up.

        1. ToS*

          Our research university’s library has a room that is called the Technology Graveyard – meaning that if a floppy needs to be read, they have an operational antique that will get the job done. Lots of media formats – cassette tapes, 8 track, CD, Beta, VHS, wax cones…records have made a comeback!

        3. Certaintroublemaker*

          You could run magnets over them? Drill holes? There’s plenty of ways to make them unreadable even if you don’t know what’s on them…

          1. MigraineMonth*

            But that would be destroying government records and possibly illegal! Nevermind that the records are completely inaccessible, you can’t *destroy* them.

        4. TM*

          There are companies that specialise in this kind of thing if you don’t need the data. You dispose of the items in locked bins. They pick them up and take them to a secure facility, where the contents are thoroughly shredded. Depending on the requirements, a certificate of disposal may issued – obviously this depends on the regulatory environment, but it will state that the items are disposed of in accordance with regulation XYZ by bonded company #1234789.

          These places aren’t super expensive, often cheaper than some poor person drilling through drives by hand – retrieving data IS expensive – and it’s nice to have the liability gone.

    5. AlsoAFed*

      hah! I relate to this comment from the depths of my soul. I got my office mates “this is how we’ve always done it” coffee mugs one year so at least we’d have one positive association (coffee) with the phrase

      1. Emmy*

        i feel seen. i also feel like i could start naming programs right now and would get answering shudders in response. DHS knows which green text antique linked to a Missouri cave I’m thinking about lol

    8. Anon for this*

      I work for a government healthcare agency. Some of our software looks like it is from the 80s… and probably is.

      1. JustaTech*

        Ha! A few years ago I got a look at the software we use for organizing our submissions to the FDA and I was like “holy Windows 3.1!” and the person who used it said “This is the upgrade, the last one looked like it was straight out of MS-DOS.”

        Then again we just got some software for tracking stuff and the interface looks exactly like it runs in DOS, even though it is completely up to date and Windows 11 compatible. Apparently people like it that way.

      2. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        I work for a non-government healthcare agency — the largest hospital system in my state — and our billing system (which has a text-based interface) says it was last updated in 1993.

      3. Emmy*

        our agency’s key database is a program from the 70s-80s….it runs web-based now but still the same thing, all the functions are accessed with special codes. it holds tens of millions of critical records and is being replaced, but people are understandably nervous about doing so…

    9. AnonFedSub*

      Applies to gov subcontractors who have to get equipment from the feds too. We can’t get a replacement for contamination monitoring systems that are in daily critical use and are so old that the last upgrade was to DOS. We’re nursing them along (thank goodness for nerdy “I can make you a cable for that” folks!) because new replacements aren’t in the fed budget and the subcontractor isn’t allowed to buy them ourselves because they’re worksite dependent and would have to be left there if someone else gets the contract in the future.

  5. The Wizard Rincewind*

    I worked for a medical office in the 2010s that had finally switched over to using computer-based scheduling and invoice building/tracking a few months before I started. The office manager had to basically build all the programs herself in Excel and pilot them for the owner before she was allowed to implement them. I cannot imagine doing all that stuff by hand! It was a busy office! How did anything else get done?!

    1. Generic Name*

      WTH, why not just buy Quicken or Quickbooks or some other off-the-shelf invoicing program? My old company was like this. In no way was the business related to programming or computing, yet the owner insisted on using homegrown, bespoke “programs” for all kinds of purposes that had numerous programs already existing that she refused to buy. I guess it was cheapness and terminal uniqueness on her part?

      2. Seven If You Count Bad John*

        In our case it’s cheapness. There’s a perfectly fine made-for-our-industry project management software out there that would save a lot of time and solve a lot of problems, but the owners won’t shell out for it. So we use Excel for the dispatch calendar.

      3. Meow*

        My husband works for a for-profit that spends loads of money on all kinds of things, but he had to buy his own software to make PDFs and write his own project tracker because they wouldn’t pay for a Microsoft Project license. Some places are so weird about paying for software.

  6. Veryanon*

    In my current job, we used to have a homegrown HRIS that was awful, unwieldy, and really difficult to use, but because the Sr VP of HR literally developed it himself, it took like 20 years to convince him to replace it with a real HRIS system, which finally happened 2 years ago. We still have to maintain it as so many employee records are housed there.

  7. Tom R*

    As a federal employee (Canada) there are too many to list, but my favourite bad one was a system designed to replace spreadsheets but they didn’t update any of the processes so using it ended up being just like spreadsheets but worse in every possible way. Eventually they updated the awful process so I don’t know how they will use the system (I’m on parental leave at the moment so it’s not my problem right now)

      1. tan audel*

        PHOENIX

        isn’t this the one where the only way to access reports as a customer was through a proprietary software that looked like it was designed in the first half of the 90s bc i was so glad when the 1 client we had that used it took their business elsewhere

  8. DeskApple*

    I’m an editor on a team of other editors, and we interface with editors in different countries. NONE of them are willing to fully use a central system for our documents like SharePoint (used by 98% of the company) and instead insist on tracking changes, then uploading endless versions of documents with initials at the end. The problem is you will get to the end of a string of people’s initials and still not know if it’s the final version.

    The only thing more frustrating is the client who PRINTS our PDF proofs, circulates them through their department, notified us that each department will hand note their changes, then emails us the scanned PDFs in black and white.

    5. Ludd-ish*

      Lol! I have managed co-authoring a report with two dozen people. A handful of them could not/would not use SharePoint. I accommodated them by periodically emailing them the current copy of the shared draft, then they would make Track Changes, then I would type in their changes to the shared document. For a couple folks, Track Changes was too complex. They just wrote what they wanted to say in the body of an email and I added it to the shared doc and edited it to flow with the existing text. But honestly, I appreciated that all these people were punctual with their contributions. And someday I suppose I too will feel overwhelmed by the latest technology and be relieved if someone accommodates me like that. I’m already squeamish about using ChatGPT, so maybe it’s beginning…!

      1. Missa Brevis*

        Nah, ChatGPT just genuinely isn’t good at most of the things people are trying to use it for. There’s a real difference between wanting a new tool or technology do actually do what it claims to and being unwilling to try something just because it’s new and unfamiliar.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Yeah, we’re just starting to come down from the hype curve. ChatGPT is going to find it’s actual niche at some point and people will hopefully stop trying to use it for applications where accuracy matters.

          I’m thinking it’s actual niche is going to be sentence completion suggestions, beautifully written spam/scam emails, maybe political speech writing (because no one expects that to be truthful).

          1. But Of Course*

            I don’t know, I expect political speechwriters to know that dressing has more than one meaning and not suggest that the recommended serving of the bandage type on a salad is 2 tbsp.

      2. JustaTech*

        Far and away the best thing about my company adopting Teams in the pandemic is finally getting a Sharepoint that (mostly) works so we can do simultaneous editing of a document. I’d done it a little in grad school with Google Docs and it was a freaking revelation to have everyone working in the same document at once, especially as we were all remote.

        I don’t love that now my computer defaults to opening Word docs in Edge, which for some reason does some exciting things to the formatting (one time an entire 45 page report was in BLOCK CAPS), but at least I can find it.

    6. thesharpiestpencilinthedrawer*

      I am essentially a project manager for a vendor of a written and designed product and the number of clients that do this is SHOCKING. My favorite is when clients will hand draw edits to design elements — adding little stars or polka dots etc…

        1. Butterfly Counter*

          HA! This is what my final revision of my dissertation looked like.

          ButterflyCounterDissertationFinal-FinalFinal-Last-ThisOne-FinalToTurnIn-LastRevisions

          1. NotBatman*

            I just numbered mine DissertationDraft1 through 48. The document I sent to be published was literally named DissertationDraft48, because I have a superstition about naming things _final.

            1. Nesprin*

              Lol better than my thesis- the latter drafts are named:
              Dissertation_final,
              Dissertation_final-final,
              Dissertation_finalandImeanitthistime,
              Dissertation_nopethisoneistherealfinal,
              Dissertation_648pm,
              Dissertation702pm,
              and Dissertation_actuallysubmitted

              1. L.H. Puttgrass*

                Don’t forget Dissertation_actuallysubmitted_(corrected).

                I had to do that with mine. Found a stray “Error! Reference source not found.” in my dissertation after I’d submitted it to the publisher. Fortunately, it was only a few days later, so IIRC they didn’t charge me anything for the correction.

                1. Gollum's Favorite Hobbit*

                  I gave up with names with draft tracking for my actual final draft, which was named The_One_Ring.

            2. Blue Spoon*

              Any file I have to create that has iterations gets named like Iron Man names his armor. “Cash Handling Training Mark 1” “Cash Handling Training Mark 2” etc. My old supervisor used to make fun of me for it, but it’s really easy to keep track of them and I can always do another one.

            3. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

              In my department we all used DissertationDraft_20241017 and so forth so they would sort right.

              1. Dr Vibrissae*

                that’s what I do. Add the date to the draft, update every time I work on it. Sorts beautifully and I can find when certain changes were made a retrieve old versions by cross referencing my writing log. If love to use Google docs for everything, but it doesn’t work with my reference manager, so I have to export documents when I’m ready to update the bibliography, not great.

          2. Edwina*

            there’s also:

            top_level_folder/subfolder/other_subfolder_with_much_of_the_same_text_as_the_parent_folders/filename_with_much_of_the_same_text_as_the_parent_folders, ETC!

            And, big surprise, the path is >255 characters and the files cannot be downloaded, synced, or unzipped.

            fun times.

      2. Typity*

        Hah! I just got a project to edit, and there are five or six versions in the project folder labeled “final” — Final, FinalVersion2, Final-IGNORE, final-FINAL…

    9. Toot Sweet*

      I feel you! When I first started here in Training & Development, I had a boss who insisted on 1) circulating paper copies of our learning modules to have others hand-write their changes; 2) scanning and saving digital copies of said hand-written changes; and 3) saving the paper copies of the hand-written changes as well. When she was fired, I had the distinct pleasure of deleting all of those digital files and putting the paper copies in the shredder bin. It felt amazing. :)

      1. Justin*

        Oh god, at my last training job, we needed approval from our clients, which is fine, except it was required we print every single manual we wrote for comments, many of which were like 100 pages.

        We also had to print out all slide decks for comments from the client. Why?

    10. JFC*

      I do similar work, and we had a client who had a weekly project with us. They insisted on having someone from our company print out multiple color copies of their proofs and hand-deliver them to their business so they could proof them by hand. This usually happened multiple times a week. All of our other clients receive email proofs and submit changes digitally. It was a huge pain, especially since this business was on the outskirts of town and not convenient to reach. We’ve had some staffing changes and I think the practice has finally stopped, thank goodness.

    11. Slow Gin Lizz*

      Man, I used to edit the books my old boss wrote. One of the consultants that worked for us would CALL ME to tell me every single one of his edits, despite my telling him multiple times that it would be a TON quicker to just track changes in a Word doc and I can read it and make the changes. Instead, he would call me and talk for 2.5 hours each time. It made me crazy.

      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        My point, which I forgot to add, being that I actually would have preferred a pdf with handwritten notes on it to talking on the phone with him for 2.5 hours. But otherwise it’s ridiculous in this day and age to have edits done in writing. I suppose there are some people who still don’t want to type anything, I guess???

      2. iglwif*

        When I was a copyeditor I had a journal editor like this! I would send him a PDF proof and he would call me to tell me what needed to be changed, and it was the whole issue so it would take HOURS.

        Explaining to him how to use markup tools in Acrobat did not help. Saying it was fine to print out the PDF and write on it did not help. Telling him he could just email me his changes did not help. Avoiding him via call display did not help — he would just call back. (And he was calling long-distance on a landline during business hours! It must have cost his university the earth.)

        Thank goodness that journal only published 4 times a year!

    13. The Wizard Rincewind*

      Oh hey, are you me? When I started at my editorial job, we were still printing out articles and proofing by hand. This slowly switched to the Word documents with initials/version numbers, which is where we are today. We have a professional Microsoft Office account and everything, but people with Macs were having issues opening documents and one of my coworkers swears that working with the document in the cloud doesn’t work for him regardless so we’re still sending attachments.

      I don’t really mind it, as I prefer working in the Word application instead of the browser, so I guess I’m also part of the problem. But every time I attach a document to an email, Outlook “helpfully” suggests that we get rid of version numbers and upload to OneDrive! Alas, Outlook, that’s not how we roll.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        Ugghhhhhh the one coworker who swears the thing doesn’t work is the bottleneck of SO MANY technological steps forward. And it’s never the thing that isn’t working! PEBKAC every time

    15. Mockingjay*

      Dear Deity, this is EXACTLY my situation. We have plenty of tracking tools, we have had SharePoint for over a decade, and they still email the next document iteration file with freaking@#$! initials and date. Oh, and we have to send PDFs for review because they are “afraid” that the SMEs (subject matter experts) might screw up the MS Word file. Except the SMEs want to work directly on the source file to ensure all content is added correctly.

      I secretly supply Word files to any engineer who asks. (Hint, hint)

    16. RagingADHD*

      I wrote and edited entire books from scans or even phone screenshots of handwritten edits. Wouldn’t wish it on anyone, never doing it again.

    17. Academic Librarian*

      I had a client who refused to use the comments in Word, and insisted on putting her comments/corrections in a separate document that I then had to match up to the actual document for updates. After a couple of projects like this, I just stopped taking her jobs.

      1. DeskApple*

        oh no!!! I know Word does have the compare/ merge versions feature but I never got it to work correctly. You’re describing an absolute nightmare, though one rare time that I think ChatGPT would really help hahaha

    18. WheresMyPen*

      I work in magazine publishing and it was only covid and working from home that stopped us circulating printed pdfs. Though I did enjoy marking up on paper and seeing the whole page physically did help with spotting errors or layout issues sometimes.

      1. WheresMyPen*

        In fact, when I joined in 2019, they were still posting pdfs to freelancers to markup on paper at home. When I look at our schedules now I have no idea where they found the extra time to do that, especially when pdf and email had been around a long time by then

  9. Dust Bunny*

    We had a database that, after years of it not being updated appropriately, now exists as searchable .pdf screen shots. The .pdf version is actually more navigable and easier to use than the original database form, which tells you how outdated it was.

    1. Edwina*

      The .pdf version is actually more navigable and easier to use than the original database form, which tells you how outdated it was.

      oh no.

    2. Cinn*

      This reminds me of a portal (so everything relating to safety, HR etc) I used to have to use. When you started and someone showed you how to use it, it was all navigating to pages by favourites. No one could tell you how to find the pages you needed, you had to get the links from someone.

      Thankfully, like yours, that’s all moved to SharePoint and you can find things now. But the amount of weird looks I got when I started and asked how I could find things without needing someone to send me links was baffling.

  10. not nice, don't care*

    I use a homemade database that was created about 20 years ago by a since-retired IT person. I regularly deal with upper admin trying to sunset this platform due to fears of unreliability etc. but so far they never have any viable alternatives with the same features and simplicity. I’ve had to add a few steps to my workflow to assuage their fears, and I’m sure someday the plug will be pulled, but for now I am nestled into my legacy system and one of the most productive 1-person units in my department.

    1. DEJ*

      In my former niche career, the gold standard of computer programs only runs on DOS. There have been other programs created that do some of the functions of the gold standard program but there is one big function that no one has been able to replicate that keeps the gold standard program around. This has caused IT headaches for lots of people in my former career because the IT folks keep saying ‘you can’t use this program anymore’ when there literally isn’t another option.

      1. Ally McBeal*

        This reminds me of when I took a temp job at one of the most famous fashion brands in the entire world. Discovering that they were still operating on Linux in 2011 was quite the shock. Fortunately I’d worked off another Linux system back in college so my learning curve wasn’t too bad. The difference between that system and yours is that I’m fairly confident there was no special gold-standard program they needed… they just never upgraded their IT.

        1. AcademiaNut*

          Linux is a current maintained and active operating system – I work on Linux systems regularly.

        2. Susan Calvin*

          Agree with AcademiaNut, unless you missed a step in recounting this and meant to say they were still using the original 1991 release of Linux, this is kind of baffling?

        3. amoeba*

          Yup, coming in to third this… Linux is great and I don’t see what the problem is? A vast portion of IT savvy people in the world use it (I’m actually really annoyed I have to use Windows at work, and if I were an actual IT person, I’d consider that weird and unprofessional! It’s Linux or maybe Mac.)

    2. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

      There is an entire fairly major industry in the US where most of the participants use a workflow/inventory/data management system that is very archaic. It requires knowledge of COBOL. Finding people who still know COBOL is getting difficult. Finding people to teach people COBOL is also difficult. Job security for 70 yo programmers

      1. Glad I'm Not in the Rat-Race Any More.*

        OY! I’m only 62. And I’m sure my uni taught COBOL at least through the end of the century, because everyone had to deal with Y2K.

        1. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

          The last time they had an opening they ended up having to unretire someone so he could teach it to someone else.

      2. I never have real plans*

        In 2020 when everyone had unemployment benefits due to the pandemic, NJ put out a plea for volunteers who knew COBOL because the whole system was run off 40 year old mainframes not ready to handle hundreds of thousands of new applicants in the first month of the pandemic.

        1. Edwina*

          I am so not surprised by this! Get with the times, NJ!

          I lived in NJ in the ’90s, and I was appalled to discover that the DMV was still doing everything on paper. Their computers were so slow, the lines of people waiting were looooong.

      4. MigraineMonth*

        Much of the financial sector and a significant chunk of healthcare runs on the MUMPS (a.k.a. M or Cache) programming language.

        Just a couple of the exciting features of the MUMPS programming language include:
        – Error handling via GOTO statements
        – “if” statements that may execute both the “if” and “else” blocks depending on the contents of the “if” block
        – No reserved words and all commands can be abbreviated to a single character.

        The following is, to the best of my recollection, completely valid MUMPS code:
        i i]” d g e(d,g,i,e) i 1 e e=i

      5. Macropodidae*

        My aunt was a retired COBOL programmer who was unretired for a pretty hefty sum around the Y2K stuff. She’s in her 80s now. Yeah, I realize that’s pretty extraordinary for a woman of her age, but her parents placed a huge emphasis on education…her two brothers both have PhDs (one has two).

    3. Grenelda Thurber*

      That’s the thing, isn’t it? Staying up-to-date with current technology is *expensive* and *time-consuming.* That’s why government organizations supported by tax dollars are decades behind; tax payers don’t want to pay the taxes required to keep everything running on state-of-the-art technology operated by people who understand said technology. Our customers are huge corporations with way more money than the DMV (and arguably the best IT personnel to be had) and once something works, even they won’t touch it until there’s no other choice, e.g. the OS is no longer supported, the networks are too slow to handle the traffic. Windows NT was torn from the grasping, desperate hands of thousands of wailing users. It wasn’t the latest, but it was STABLE. I don’t think that’s going to change until there’s some breakthrough that makes technology cheap and really simple to use. I’m not holding my breath…

      1. Moira's Rose's Garden*

        This. Also the public healthcare sector.
        Federal dollars (including Medicare/Medicaid, & private insurers generally follow suit) come with *very* specific funding uses attached (unless you’re the Pentagon/DOD/DHS maybe?).
        The amount of budget available for IT generally goes to maintaining what’s there (often minimally) and revamping whole systems can cost millions or billions.

  11. AndersonDarling*

    Family business story… I worked at a commercial real estate company where the Owner’s personal assistant refused to learn anything new. Therefore, there were some forms that never evolved to PDFs, or Word, or Excel, or anything logical. These forms were photocopied and filled in, by the personal assistant, using a typewriter.
    It was like time traveling. She would take the dust cover off the typewriter, line up every space so the levers would fill in the correct spots and then take hours filling in a single form. The electric motor of the typewriter could be heard throughout the entire office.
    When visitors asked what that buzzing and striking sound was, I pretended like I didn’t know. How can you close a $M deal after saying, “Oh, that’s the typewriter that we use to fill out forms!”

    5. Slow Gin Lizz*

      What on earth???? I am old enough that I grew up with a typewriter in the house and used it once in a great while as a child to type book reports or something. It was such a PITA that I rejoiced when we got a PC, because I could type fast and then correct my errors rather than having to peck out each letter super carefully so as not to have to use the correction tape too many times. I don’t understand who in the world would want to keep doing such a thing….

    6. Quinalla*

      Wow, this takes me back to my Mom getting out her old typewriter on a few college applications that were required to be typed, but before you could type things on a pdf or similar, so that was the only option. I cannot imagine setting up to do that on purpose when you have so many amazing options now for making and filling out forms!!

    7. Paint N Drip*

      omg this is really tickling my memories! My first office job out of college I was waiting for my interview and thought I heard a typewriter, but that couldn’t POSSIBLY be the case since it is 2013… definitely yes, and we had SEVERAL in the office. By the time I left there was only one, used perhaps once monthly by the PT formerly-retired file clerk (because they also had one of those! wild)

      1. Overthinking it*

        I WISH we had a typewriter here, because sometimes you really need to use snail-mail, and our printers – which are big old photocopiers/scanners – won’t print envelopes. ‘Cause no one ever needs an envelope . . until they do. And handwritten looks . . less than professional. (You can set up a label, and send THAT through the printer, but doing it so you don’t waste a full sheet of labels to print one, seems to require making the address a separate document, and lots of counting. Wasn’t long ago, we had printers that did envelopes, and you could do them so easily, send them to print from right inside the word processing file! Sigh!

    8. goddessoftransitory*

      There’s a local guy whose actual business is typing up archaic forms on various typewriters because those forms were designed for typewriters and can’t, apparently, exist online. (You guessed it, mostly government stuff.) He owns just about every typewriter made in the twentieth century.

    9. Workerbee*

      This made me think that of COURSE she wouldn’t learn anything new that could save her some time – because then she’d be given more to do!

    10. Funeral admin*

      I work at a funeral home and we had to dig our old typewriter out of the garage a few years ago to give to the cemetery because they were still using paper triplicate forms that couldn’t be printed on. I’ve also been told another funeral home nearby still uses a typewriter for some stuff which absolutely baffles me. Then again, we only upgraded to e-fax this year, sigh.

  12. Yup*

    Our healthcare system still uses faxes. I feel like that’s a big one.

    Also, once they created an email address with about 35 characters (the acronym of this, followed by the acronym of that, etc.) for a very critical program–and placed the poster for the program online as an image. So no copy/paste but you had to carefully type it out. Chaos.

    1. Chocolate Teapot*

      The bank I work still uses faxes, but the fax machine is incorporated into the printer/copier/scanner, so it’s not like the olden days with the funny noises and the shiny paper on a roll.

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        It’s for security. faxes are still more secure than email. (Still mad I can no longer file my taxes via phone, which it the most secure way.)

        1. Hannah Lee*

          Though that “security” reason flies out the window when senders are careless about entering the receiving fax numbers.

          The US company I work at does not use faxes. But at least a half a dozen times a year our multi-function printer spits out long and detailed medical records or financial information sent by organizations we don’t do business with, about people we don’t know. And the social security number and other sensitive personal information is never ever redacted.

          One medical practice in particular used to be repeat offender, and I was always astounded at how unconcerned they were when I’d call and tell them that I just received Mr Alphonso’s entire medical chart in error. At one point, they had done it repeatedly over several weeks, so apparently no one was trying to figure out the issue to fix it.

          The next fax that came through had some note on the cover sheet that made it seem urgent … like a patient’s next steps for managing a potentially serious health situation required input from a particular doctor that day. So before running it through the shredder, I looked through the pages, found the contact info for the patient whose record it was AND what medical practice/clinic they had been trying to send them to and reached out to BOTH of them. Both were very glad I called and furious with the medical office that had been so careless. I hope there was serious fall out for the sender.

          That was the last time that particular practice faxed stuff to us.

          1. Orv*

            I worked for a company that had a pretty innovative (for the time) fax system that directed all incoming faxes to the correct person’s email address. To accomplish this we had a block of 16 consecutive fax numbers.

            One of them was one digit different from a local prosthetics lab. We got a lot of really strange misfaxes.

            1. EvilQueenRegina*

              An old job had 0870 as an extension number – for those not in the UK, 0870 is used quite often for companies’ premium rate numbers. People were always coming through to it having forgotten to dial 9 for an outside line, and we also got people trying to fax it. The only way we could get rid of those was to transfer them to the actual fax machine on reception. I hate to think what kind of strange things came through.

          2. Rage*

            I had a similar situation with Bank of America. I live in Kansas.

            My phone number at the time was (not really) 123-456-7890

            The number for the Dallas, Texas main branch of BofA was 456-789-0000.

            The employees at my local branch told their people that when you were doing an internal transfer from Kansas to Dallas, Texas, you didn’t have to dial the “1” before the area code. This was inaccurate.

            So a local employee would be talking to someone they needed to send down to the Dallas office and they would dutifully transfer them to 456-789-0000. But since they didn’t dial the “1”, the phone system did not consider it to be a long distance call, and so merely dialed the local number of 456-7890 (the remaining three zeros were ignored by the system).

            The end result was that my personal cell phone got call after call from Bank of America transfers. I got cussed out by people who were irate that they got me (instead of the BofA employee they expected – like it was MY fault or something). I had people argue with me and demand that transfer them to the correct number (I can’t do that from my cell phone, my dude).

            The issue that made me Take Steps was that they transferred an employee from another bank…who left a voicemail which contained her customer’s name, DOB, SSN, and account number. I called her back and informed her of the situation, then changed my voicemail greeting to be “Hi, this is Rage. This is NOT BANK OF AMERICA. If you are trying to reach Bank of America, call them back. If you are trying to reach me, leave a message.”

            I tried to call Bank of America to get the issue resolved, but nobody cared.

            So, in the end, I got a new cell number. It’s been years, but I still wonder if the person who ended up with my old number is still getting calls from BofA.

            1. SAF*

              My number used to be very close to the FTC Fair Credit Reporting Office hotline – just reverse 2 digits. Oh, the voice mails I got. Oh, the places it got distributed because someone typoed a form. And I had a very similar voice mail message! And yes, I got all kinds of personal data left on my voice mail even after I put up the THIS IS NOT THE FTC message.

        2. Artemesia*

          We had a new fax machine and I was in on a weekend and didn’t realize it worked differently so I entered my code (to make sure my faxes got billed to me or my projects) and faxed a form including my SS and other data an agency needed to pay me for a consultation. Alas my code combined with the first numbers of the phone number were the number of a porn shop; when I arrived on Monday morning the secretaries were laughing and told me the person in the porn shop had called and told them they had received and destroyed the fax. Took a long time to live it down. And I am lucky that the Porn shop receptionist was an honest person.

        3. marine grade polymer*

          “faxes are more secure than email”

          [has a mild coronary from all the junk faxes I’ve received over the years instead of the actual faxes I was expecting, the faxes I’ve sent that never went through because the recipient fax was broken, the faxes my team kept receiving from a dead lady for 5 years after she died, the medical faxes that were sent to god knows where or received by god knows whom–I wasn’t responsible for the latter 2, that’s based on horror stories I’ve heard from friends]

        4. Moira's Rose's Garden*

          Faxes are actually among the least secure communications, and are associated with the highest rate of inadvertent protected health info privacy breaches.

          But smaller provider practices frequently don’t have the IT infrastructure to transfer things like office notes, radiology reports, patient medical records & etc by other means.

          So fax it is, and will likely remain until, IDK, some legislation mandating sunsetting faxes comes with actual funding?

      2. London Calling*

        We had a fax machine in the corner of the post room when I worked for a big events company in London a few years ago. No-one looked at it but periodically someone would throw away all the adverts that came through – until the day a government dept sales were dealing with told us our account was over due. OK, I said, when did you email it and to who? oh no, we faxed it. We ALWAYS fax invoices.

        Despite being asked, they always faxed subsequent invoices. And sent us an email to tell us. Did I mention it was a government department?

        1. MigraineMonth*

          My mom is a lovely person, but it took her a while to get a hang of email etiquette. For example, I was supposed to pick her up from the airport when she came to visit, and she insisted she’d told me when. Which was technically true; it was in paragraph four of an email primarily about my the removal of a precancerous mole with the subject line “Re: re: re: Hugh’s Birthday Celebration”.

          I explained that I didn’t always read emails right when they came in, and that for anything time-sensitive, it was best to text me. So my mom started sending me texts saying: “Time sensitive: I sent you an email.”

      3. goddessoftransitory*

        And fifteen million scam/ads printing out every time you turn it on (ahhh, so quaint.)

    2. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      This. We hired new people and I overheard their tour/introduction to the floor. “And here is our fax machine. We have it pretty much because employees have to fax documents to and receive documents from medical providers.”
      They added a fax option on the printer which numbered all the options. I’m a really rote type of person (especially because I print maybe one a month). Pressing the fourth button, Print. And getting Scan. Almost put in a support request before I stopped and realized I needed to read the words!

      1. Phony Genius*

        I was in a doctor’s waiting room one day on a new employee’s first day. She was hired from out-of-state with a lot of medical office experience. She asked why they still had a fax machine, and it was explained that under this state’s laws, medical records could only be sent by fax for security reasons. She was very surprised to hear this. (These laws have since changed to allow secure digital transmission.)

        1. Charlotte Lucas*

          But you have to have a secure system in place. Not everyone does.

          Where I work we can encrypt email, but we also have fax options.

          1. Orv*

            The secure systems are a pain in the butt, too. I’m always getting email that I have documents available in my provider’s secure patient portal. I don’t have an account to access the portal and it’s unclear how to get one.

            1. Overthinking it*

              Portals for medical info! Yuck! I refused to download SOME of my providers portals because the process required I make my cell phone password protected. It’s MY phone dammit, and I don’t WANT to have a password to open my phone! (you have a shaky hand one night and don’t get it right in 3 tries and you’re locked out of your own phone for days, if not forever. (And personally, I don’t give a f*** about the security of my medical records – other than birthdate, and possibly medicare number, neither of which show up in the portal. HPPA is rubbish, from my point of view.)

    4. Clisby*

      Oh, gosh, we once had healthcare (I mean well up into the 2010s) with a company that required faxes. If the insurance company had any question about a claim, I had to gather all the info and *fax* it to them.

      I’m not complaining about not having a simple portal to upload info to. I didn’t even have the option of emailing word documents to them. It was bizarre. Fortunately we had (OK, we still have) one of those phone/copier/fax combos. Nowadays, it comes in handy to make copies; I can’t remember the last time I had to fax anything.

      1. Orora*

        When I first started my current job 9 years ago, it was like stepping back in time. Payroll was done by uploading Excel files into the payroll system and when it was done, you had to download a new Excel file for the next payroll. We had to have print outs of every piece of documentation for payroll, so there were massive payroll binders full of printed out emails, spreadsheets and forms. Vacation requests were still on paper forms with hand signatures. Expense reports were also paper-based with receipts taped to a piece of copy paper. It was mind-boggling. Luckily some of the folks who were entrenched in these systems left and the new people have updated a lot of processes.

        Oh, and we’re in the tech field.

      2. Cj*

        I’m a cpa, and like you said sometimes the only thing the IRS will accept his faxes because of security reasons. but this is a tech question I have often wondered about.

        the document is scanned into our computer, and faxed using fax software. we don’t use a physical fax machine that goes through phone lines. so is it any more secure then emailimg it?

    6. Dust Bunny*

      We finally got rid of our fax machine because only one patron ever used it (and he was miffed that we got rid of it–we had to email things to his wife after that). But we constantly got mis-sent faxes from doctors’ offices. Fortunately, we are medical-adjacent and are a pretty secure location so in reality there was very little chance of SSN leak, etc., but in principle it was pretty bad. Ours printed on regular typing paper, though–thermofax rolls were long gone.

    7. Three Cats in a Trenchcoat*

      I was an intern only a few years ago, and the experience of sending faxes while also being issued a physical pager was like falling into a bizarre 1990s time warp.

    8. Banana Pyjamas*

      I feel like anti-fax sentiment comes from a place of digital privilege. I live somewhere where people are running for county commissioner on a platform of finally bringing reliable, high-speed internet to our county. Fax is still very much necessary. Right now my internet only has two bars, and keeps randomly reloading the page. I think there’s probably important considerations around the population a business serves.

    10. MigraineMonth*

      Yup, my department still uses faxes to communicate with health providers for *exactly one* step (registering a new patient). They fax us a piece of paper, someone manually types all the information into our software. For everything else we use the secure email and file-transfer system, but for that one step we still use a fax. We were really proud when we finally got one of the services switched over to using an online registration form, but now that service has been sun-setted so we’re back to just faxes.

    11. Wilbur*

      I broke my finger two years ago and the ER gave me a CD with my Xrays. I brought it to my doctor a few days later for a follow up and they said they didn’t have a computer in the building that could take a CD. Then they said they couldn’t do anything (they told me to come in for a follow up) and referred me to a orthopedic doctor, which is great because I really wanted to throw away $120 and two hours of my time.

    12. Susan Calvin*

      Oh fax machines… somehow my entire country is weirdly enamored with them (which, on the upside, has given our government accidentally great cyber security), and when my spouse started out as an independent contractor 10-ish years ago, most material wholesalers still required the paperwork for opening a business account to be faxed in. Even they have adopted email by now though.

    13. Spargle*

      Lots of businesses still use faxes, just not a fax machine, often for the receipt log. sending a document to a fax-email account is functionally the same as emailing it, but if the recipient has disabled the return-receipt (or you forgot to include it, or whatever), faxing is one way to go.

      A pro for the fax machine—it still works if your internet goes out.

    14. DA*

      Yeah, I work in healthcare and I probably fax at least a hundred documents a week. Mostly requisitions for imaging and labwork, but there’s also no other way I’m aware of of sending prescriptions to pharmacies. We’ve started a pilot project of emailing some kinds of appointments to patients, but doing it automatically is not compatible with our current system (in use since at least 1998, from the earliest appointments I’ve seen scheduled in it) and there’s a rule about how we can’t email anything with personal information on it, so no emailing lab requisitions, etc–a massive hassle if a patient needs a lab done urgently. Other healthcare providers do this regularly, so I always try to correct my coworkers when I hear them tell patients it’s for confidentiality reasons–it’s not. There’s nothing legally preventing it. Our organization just has a rule about how we “can’t email outside the building”, which makes it very annoying when I call another office and their answering machine tells me they don’t accept voicemails but I can email them if I need an answer.

      The most absurd thing to me is that if I want to transfer a patient record from the local or provincial systems, I am not able to save the file and upload it to our system. I have to print it out and fax it to a specific number where someone else will manually upload it.

  13. TQB*

    When I arrived at my law firm 8 years ago, there were many partners who still tracked billable time on paper and handed these notes to assistants to decipher and enter into the billing system.

    1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

      I still track my time on paper and type it into the database. I’ve had databases crash and I don’t want to have to try to recreate that time to get paid.

    2. Ham Sandwich*

      This makes some sense to me, as long as the paper notes are written quickly. It makes little sense for an attorney to spend time doing administrative work versus billable time with clients.

      Same thing applies to doctors. It seems incredibly stupid and fiscally wasteful to make doctors spend inordinate amounts of time filling out forms instead of spending that time with patients.

      1. Beau*

        I think what TBQ meant was that instead of using a Timer on the firm’s billing software, the lawyers would physically write down their time (ei, “1:30-2:15pm – telephone call with client, 3:05-3:07 – respond to email”, etc.) So their assistant has to a) calculate how much time was actually worked (47mins), and then b) convert to the docketing system (0.8 hrs).

        I had a lawyer like this and it was honestly such a pain. Back when paper notes were used (most lawyers just email me dockets now) they were supposed to write “0.8 – Telephone call with client; respond to email.”

      2. goddessoftransitory*

        Any doctor who’s quitting the profession will probably list “paperwork/insurance” as one of their top reasons for bailing. When my dad had his practice, his biggest expense was staff to deal with all the paperwork and billing.

    4. WavyGravy*

      I worked with a guy who wrote his entries on paper, but then his admin couldn’t read his handwriting, so he would dictate his handwritten notes into a tape recorder and she would transcribe that into the billing software.

      Also had another partner ask why some text in a blog post I wrote was “in blue and underlined.” That would be a URL Alan. Glad to see he’s still advising companies.

  14. Snubble*

    At an early job it took me five months of maneuvering to persuade my boss and her exec that, instead of having a single spreadsheet from which we issued sample numbers to both the component parts in the warehouse and the widgets coming off the line in the factory, which meant constant calls between the warehouse tech and the factory techs to get them to close the spreadsheet so the other team could add their samples, and sample numbers being booked out in blocks and getting shuffled between label printing and assignment, and samples not being labelled at all, and sample numbers being used twice, and generally a headache and a muddle for everyone every day…
    we should have two spreadsheets. One for the warehouse, and one for the factory. With different prefixes, so there would be no problem with duplicating numbers.
    Five months of persuasion to be allowed to make that change.

      1. Snubble*

        The single spreadsheet was named something like “QCS 2012 Final (2) Updated USE THIS ONE 2013”, and neither year was current.

        1. JHunz*

          I think everyone who’s ever worked in an office has had to open a spreadsheet with a name like that :(

  15. I'm A Little Teapot*

    I’m an auditor. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen crazy, inefficient, unnecessary, or even actively detrimental processes. All because “that’s how we’ve always done it”. Particularly when software has changed. You do something a certain way because of the limitations or quirks of the system, then when the system changes you don’t actually re-think what you’re doing. When I come in and start asking why you do something, I get the deer in headlights look. “Because that’s always how its been done” is not an acceptable answer, and it pretty much guarantees that I will be digging into it more.

    1. I'm A Little Teapot*

      Also, I’m very used to be being used as the hammer to force change to be made. It’s silly but so many times you can have staff asking for something to change but until the auditor says it, it’s not going to happen. Some people love auditors for this reason.

      1. Nicosloanica*

        Oh man this is my dream. I understand our staff feels underprepared to make changes, and doesn’t want to spend time learning whole new systems (I truly do feel this in my heart also!) but it’s amazing what change can happen when it suddenly HAS to happen because external thing said so. Suddenly change is possible! It’s a miracle!

      2. Margaret Cavendish*

        We have SO MANY things that people do “because Internal Audit says we have to.” So my response is cool, let me just confirm that with IA. Then I talk to IA and they say they’re auditing the policies provided by the business. So it’s just an endless feedback loop of “we’re just following somebody else’s rules,” combined with a healthy dose of “we’ve always done it this way.”

      3. TheActualA*

        Me, I’m people. When I can’t get buy-in from the other director I work with on an update to a “we’ve always done it that way” process I’ve resorted to telling her that the auditors will want it that way. Better controls will benefit her at the end of the day too.

      1. Jackalope*

        It can and should be overridden by other reasons. But sometimes if you have a method that works, it’s reasonable to keep it because it’s the system everyone already knows.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Exactly. There is generally a cost (sometimes significant!) to change, particularly when you’re forcing it on employees/users. Even moving a button from the left corner to the right corner turns an automatic task one that requires extra thought and care. I work in tech UI, and I try to make sure there’s a really good reason for any change that disrupts a user’s existing workflow, or at least some improvement that counterbalances the pain of change.

          On the other hand, I had a college roommate who liked to rearrange the furniture every month for no apparent benefit, so clearly some people have greater desire for change than I do.

    3. JustaTech*

      A few years ago we got a new data acquisition instrument that required re-doing all of our analysis templates. It was also an opportunity to reconsider what software we used for doing the analysis. So I looked at what we were actually doing and why, and decided that we needed to move to the new system.
      Re-making all the templates for the new software took a couple of months (on and off) and was pretty frustrating, but in the end I felt pretty good about it.
      Then we didn’t use it much for a couple of years. Coming back to it I kept asking myself – could I have done this an even more different way? Am I trying to cram a square peg in a round hole? Or are these the limits of the software and will there always be weird compromises?

  16. ChurchOfDietCoke*

    Now is a good time to tell you about the Box / No Box Printout scenario.

    I used to work for a publishing company. They had a big warehouse. In the Olden Days when a computer-based system was first put into the warehouse, the setup was that an order would print out in duplicate. Printout one would go into the box with the order, to be sent to the customer. Printout two would go into a folder which would be sent to accounts for them to do the invoicing to the customer.

    Except, when e-books and online stuff became a thing, the system still printed out two. Printout two went into the folder which would be sent to accounts, printout one went…. in the bin.

    And then a new accounting system came in that meant invoicing was done electronically.

    Yes, BOTH printouts went in the bin, until someone realised that they could just…. stop printing them. Which took about ten years.

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      I have no initial response to this story that will not offend someone by my choice of language.

    6. Storm in a teacup*

      Maybe some machevallian middle manager was saving this for a later date when asked to make savings, they could suggest stopping this and saving x thousand pounds on paper costs?!

    7. Annie Edison*

      I honestly had to read this twice to fully process it because it’s just so absurd that my brain couldn’t believe what was happening the first time around!

      1. Working with professionals*

        we did forcibly move to a new software and the users of the new software demanded that the screens be named and look exactly like the old software. Mind you these are data search screens.We asked them to tell us what data they were pulling to cross reference to the new software. They couldn’t tellus, they only knew the screen name. Their demands were not accepted and recently a new hire vented about a report they needed having the name of the old software, how were they supposed to know that when that software was gone 5 years ago. Those of us who helped with implementation were silently smug about our predictions coming true.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Sounds like getting directions in the small town where I grew up. “Well, you take this road past where the Five-and-Dime store was before it moved and the house that was painted bright pink for a while, turn left where the Henderson’s house was before it burned down, cross the river where the covered bridge was before it washed away…”

      1. Hannah Lee*

        Reminds me of that one vendor I work with who, back in the day, would always mail their hard copy invoices in triplicate. We never needed the 3 copies, we’d just toss 2 in the recycling bin as soon as they came in. They weren’t responsive when we asked for just one so we just let it go.

        At some point we finally convinced them to stop sending paper copies, years after most of our other suppliers were already sending pdfs by email.

        But for some reason, they STILL send 3 copies
        ie a single pdf file with 3. identical. pages. No idea why.

        3. Gumby*

          Let me tell you about the proposal that we worked on in 2018. This was possibly sole source, but definitely not a BAA or anything because those have reasonable submission guidelines and processes. So the gov contracting person had a lot of sway over how we needed to present our proposal. 1 printed copy, 2 digital copies on CD mailed to [address] to arrive on [due date].

          Nevermind that the proposal ran to over 200 pages (mostly supporting documentation for every material we thought we would need to buy to construct the not-yet-fully-designed widgets for the 5-part project that would, in theory, take place over 8+ years: why yes I *do* have a print out of the web page with the price for 1/2″ stainless steel Phillips-head screws that we might end up using in version 4 of the widget. Of course, by the time we get to version 4 these prices will be out of date and we may have figured out that nails work better for our purposes.). Ignore that multiple options exist for transmitting digital data without involving FedEx. No, it must be mailed.

    9. Galadriel's Garden*

      I work in publishing now, and this is the most publishing story I’ve ever heard – lol.

  17. UpstateDownstate*

    I worked at a very modern presenting company that was anything but behind the scenes. One simple and frustrating example was that the person processing payroll would only accept PTO requests via an outdated PDF form that had to be manually filled out (as in, filled out with a pen/paper then scanned and emailed to her). This would mean that if you wanted to take a sick or vacation day you would have to print this form out, fill it out, scan it, send it to your supervisor for a signature, and they would then send it to payroll.

    Never mind that we were using ADP WorkforceNow that had the Request PTO feature turned on and paid for! Or that you could use Adobe to fill out the form. Because they were all so used to this process no one ever thought to try and not do it any other way.

    The most I could improve at the time was make the PDF a fillable form so that it avoided unnecessary printing and scanning but even that was considered ‘weird’ and so the system remained. OH, and the form was on a letterhead the company had not used in over a decade. I mean….

    1. Debby*

      I had to smile at your post-I HAVE to use a paper PTO form that our employees have to fill out with pen/pencil. Why? Because they don’t know how to use computers :). Fortunately, there are only 9 employees, so it isn’t a lot of work for me. BTW, these employees are in their 20’s. They know how to use everything on their phones, but not a computer. Go figure.

      1. Always Tired*

        I feel this pain, but the problem isn’t that they are phone based, because I could have them log into the system and do it there. I work in construction and have a dude fully on a flip phone. In the year of our lord two thousand twenty four. They are not technologically literate enough for any electronic submission. For those who can’t navigate the HRIS app on their phone, they give a paper form to the super who sends me a picture in an email.

        Also, we do payroll weekly. It’s a good 4-6 hours every Monday double checking timecards, following up on missing time, last minute PTO requests, making PMs review time on their projects, correcting blatant errors, and finally sending to finance.

        My revolution with the process was introducing pivot tables and conditional formatting to avoid manually entering each employee’s total hours and flagging errors in the excel sheet.

      2. anxieties, attack!*

        This is actually a serious issue growing amongst young people. It seems unbelievable, until you consider that the tail end of the millennial generation/early gen Z had a lot more flexibility with what we could do *on* the internet than kids do these days. A lot of my friends doing web/IT stuff these days got their start doing HTML coding for a custom Neopets or MySpace page, or just messing around on a PC they had access to and learning about Linux. These days, all kids are getting are pared-down (Chromebooks), locked-down (Apple) systems. I couldn’t even easily transfer an old save for a mobile version of a very simple game (Stardew Valley) from one old phone to the other without getting into root access for my new phone!!! We’re losing recipes because companies/manufacturers don’t want people to be able to get into their stuff and mess around, plus capitalism of course (Chromebooks are incredibly cheap, therefore the perfect school “computer” for kids).

        1. Ally McBeal*

          I taught myself HTML with OpenDiary and then LiveJournal and am all the better for it, even though I don’t use it very often in my current role. I also used to have a working understanding of my computer (circa 2004-08, using IBMs/Lenovos) and could defrag it, fix other basic issues, etc. Operating systems have become so much more opaque in the intervening years so I’m glad my brother does techy stuff for a living because I’m not confident I could learn how to screw around with my current OS.

          1. UpstateDownstate*

            Open Diary and Live Journal user here too! And what was that other website…Geocities? Sigh…

        2. AcademiaNut*

          As a Gen-Xer I’ve noticed this trend. I work in a very tech heavy STEM field, and I would say the basic computing skills of undergrads have decreased over the years. Smart phones are a very passive use when it comes to programming – you download apps and use them. There’s no particular incentive to learn about programming or mess about with the OS; in fact, the manufacturers vehemently discourage this.

        3. MigraineMonth*

          I have mixed thoughts about this. On the one hand, it’s definitely true that “kids these days” probably spend less time messing around with their OS and writing crazy sparkling websites than we did. On the other hand, our generation probably spent less time as kids in the command line than the previous generation, yet we managed to turn out a reasonable number of tech-savvy adults who created cool UIs for their IDEs and plug-and-play website creators. Being able to do things the old way or knowing the distance an electrical signal can travel in a copper wire in one nanosecond isn’t always useful.

          As my dad says, very few kids these days learn how to shoe horses, but that’s not a harbinger of societal decline and collapse.

    2. Ialwaysforgetmyname*

      I’m a benefits administrator and our tuition reimbursement program requires requests to be submitted with 4 signatures from different supervisors (a problem on its own but one thing at a time). Employees would print the form, sign it, hand it to their supervisor, who signed it and then scanned it to their supervisor who was typically located elsewhere. That person printed and signed it, then scanned it to someone else… and so on until it got to me.

      Last year I created a fillable Adobe version of this same form that eliminated the need for printing and scanning, simplifying the process for everyone and saving paper.

      NO ONE USES IT. Despite multiple reminders, everyone uses the old process.

      1. Hanani*

        My previous university was forced to switch to electronic paperwork during the pandemic. Personally I found this to be a long-overdue update. Except! Turns out they’ve gone back to physical paper for reasons unknown (I left for a new job in the meantime).

        1. JustaTech*

          For years I filled out an internal order form electronically, then would print it to sign in, scan it, and send it off to the warehouse.
          Then someone decided that this was Wrong and Not Allowed, so now I have to download the form, print it out, hand-write all the items I need to order, and then scan that tot he warehouse. But I don’t have to sign it anymore.

          I also had to write a memo that I had counseled myself on proper use of forms. Still annoyed about that one.

      3. UpstateDownstate*

        I feel your pain! I did the same thing and I think my fillable PDF only got used 15% of the time. It was incredibly painful to observe and …process the forms! I tried to also explain that you could save your signature as a jpeg and drop it into a file but no one wanted to hear that.

    3. Harvey 6'3.5"*

      I work for a government agency that still tracks their work product using a system originally coded in the 1970s. While many aspects of the work have been updated, including going totally electronic and scanning in the old paper documents while requiring new documents be electronic, even the new electronic system uses the very old tracking program.

    4. UpstateDownstate*

      I realized after reading a few of the responses that the ‘print it out, fill it out, scan it, save it’ was also the process this business used for ….PERFORMANCE REVIEWS! ;aklsdjfa;lsdkjfsadlkfj

      I guess I totally blanked out on this bc it was so unbelievable but the Review form was about 6-8 pages long, required a whole bunch of writing and circling and whatever, and possibly the worst part of it all is that once it was all scanned and saved no one ever read it b/c everyone has terrible handwritting and who the heck wants to put up with that? Truly sad.

      As you can probably guess I made this also into a fillable PDF form (of about 3 pages) and who knows if they ever even used it b/c I left by the time the next review cycle rolled around. I mean it was 2022!!!

      Sidenote: a funny question to ask during the interview process could be ‘How do you request and process PTO? …electornically or …with a PDF?’ LOLzzz

  18. IEanon*

    We use a home-grown system for time card reporting for student employees, emergency hires and other wage categories besides regular staff at our university. It could NEVER be replaced because it was designed by alumni back in the early 2000s and I guess this was a crowning achievement to be archived for the annals of history.

    The problem is that the system DOES NOT WORK. It routinely kicks people off payroll, removes supervisor access to approve timecards and does not allow the employees themselves to go back in time and correct punches once we pass 11:59pm that day. So we end up with students who have reported something like 32 hours in 3 days. We also run on a Sat to Fri work day for reasons I don’t understand, but assume have to do with this system.

    My department is partly responsible for chasing up employees who have violated their minimum allowed hours (federal regulations around non-citizens on work authorization statuses) and we were getting 15 emails a day about people with violations that were not real, just failed clock-outs that their hiring department had to manually correct. We finally got them to ease off and only alert us if/when it becomes clear that the violation is real, and stop telling people their employment and visa were about to be terminated and they could be sent back home.

    It was just announced that we’re moving to a new (and still free) system next semester and everyone on campus with student workers is both thrilled and terrified to see how this is going to play out. We all assume it can’t be worse, but I’ve been proven wrong before…

    2. Czech Mate*

      My university is like this, too. In defense of the home-grown system–if all of your other systems are based on the home-grown system, changing IT basically causes everything else to come to a complete standstill, so it’s hard to do. My school is currently transitioning from one home-grown system (created in the early 80s and yes, students literally had to use MS-DOS to do things like register for classes) to…another home-grown system. That has taken years to implement. And glitches all the time.

    3. OutdatedAnon*

      This is similar to the company I left a while back. In their industry, they were the first to get a website and the first with an order tracking system. They’re still using the same order tracking system built in 2002 by someone no longer with the company, and they want to try and sell it to other companies as a new source of revenue. But it’s insanely outdated, constantly breaks, and isn’t intuitive to use. Literally no one would ever buy this.

    4. MarfisaTheLibrarian*

      My employer doesn’t have any way for employees to track vacation time! One HR person has a spreadsheet or something with everyone’s available PTO, and you need to email her if you want to know how much you have. Apparently sometimes her records are wrong.

      1. MyWimsey*

        Same! HR keeps a spreadsheet and at the end of every month she prints each person’s tab (or maybe she keeps a separate spreadsheet for each of the 55 of us, who knows?) and puts it in interdepartmental mail to each person. I created a spreadsheet for myself so at least I can tell if she makes mistakes.

        Also, the ONLY way to request time off is to grab a pen and the blue form. And if you’re changing your hours or work site, grab a pen and the yellow form. Oh, and if you’re doing a webinar or online meeting, that counts as changing your work site, so don’t forget your yellows! And make a photocopy of the form before you send it in, because otherwise there’s no way to know what you’ve requested!

        We got new time clocks earlier this year.

        We still have to do the paper forms.

        I’ve worked in public libraries for a long time and the last time I had to hand write anything to do with a schedule or PTO was 2006.

  19. Miette*

    This is going to be a real cathartic moment for every corporate accountant who has to do half their analyses in Excel because the GL doesn’t integrate with the AP which doesn’t integrate with Purchasing which doesn’t integrate with the inventory…

    1. Margaret Cavendish*

      Our version of Oracle has been out of support for a decade or more. It’s currently held together with duct tape and string, and the implicit knowledge of That One Guy who has been managing it this entire time. It’s going to be replaced in the next fiscal year, so hopefully it can hold on just a little bit longer!

    2. I'm A Little Teapot*

      I assure you. Even when they integrate, there’s plenty of times where the work still happens in excel. For sometimes valid reasons and sometimes invalid reasons.

      1. Nonny-nonny-non*

        Yup. My company introduced it’s own amazing (ha!) shared digital finance tool, meant to do away with the need for Excel. But we’re a global company; it only reports in USD, and they didn’t build in any exchange rate (Fx) mechanism.

        This is despite the fact that it pulls data from sources that *do* have Fx calculations available, and a number of us have been asking for five (5!) years to get Fx added.

        So everyone on a site with a non-USD currency who is asked to report on variances against last year or the relevant budget has to extract their data to… you guessed it… Excel! Where we can use the relevant Fx rates to see if its a genuine spend change, or just an Fx change.

        Intermittently the non-US people are asked why we don’t use this tool more. We try not to sob as we once again plead for inclusion of Fx.

      2. Always Tired*

        We’re on our third ERP. I still can’t send timecards straight from the project management software to the accounting software. I am told, in theory, once all the legacy project wrap up, we will be able to do it. I assume we will have a new ERP by then.

      3. MigraineMonth*

        We currently have a payment system where we send the payee an Excel form, they manually key in data from their software, they send it back, and we manually key the data into our system.

        Except we have one payee that has a massive volume, so they’ve automated the Excel generation, and with a single button click we can import the hundreds of lines of data directly into our database.

        We could be using that same simple import process for every payee, but given people’s passionate reactions to workflow change suggestions in the past, I’m kind of scared to point that out.

    3. CoffeeOwlccountant*

      This is me. Our accounting software only exists as a single installation on desktop somewhere (nobody’s quite sure physically where, which is itself concerning). The 10-12 users who use it daily log into it through a remote desktop login. This software is not integrated with our actual ERP and is not really intended for a company our size. Every single report, analysis, or statement I do every single month has to have the data exported and then manipulated in Excel. Every. Single. One.

      Why yes! I HAVE been begging for something better for awhile! How’d you know?

  20. Having a Scrummy Week*

    I am pretty sure our head of IT got fired because they refused to implement something that would potentially break the status quo of the mish-mash employee central system that everyone hates.

    1. Wolf*

      I pity all IT staff who have to work on tasks like “make this outdated clunky system work, but you’re not allowed to actually change anything”.

  21. Margaret Cavendish*

    My job is records management, which, among other things, includes making sure our files are accessible, properly stored, and destroyed in an appropriate amount of time. So stories like the ones posted so far give me heart palpitations…and also a certain sense of job security.

    The thing I’m dealing with right now is an IT person who has hundreds of pages of source code stored in his personal OneNote. But he tells me it’s fine because he always shares it with other people when they ask! Never mind that the information is completely inaccessible to the rest of the team if he’s on vacation, and presumably he’s going to leave the company at some point which will require migrating it to a shared location anyway. They’ve always done it this way, and everything has been fine so far, so what’s the problem, right?

    2. Ellie*

      We learned the hard way when a team member left that their OneNote files disappeared when their system access did and could not be recovered. So, yeah, no problem at all.

    3. Brownie*

      This is a constant fight for me. In the last 8 years we’ve switched ticketing systems 3 times and each time lost all history of what was done when by whom for our systems. This includes all the comments, code, fixes, and so on which means now when someone says “well, last upgrade we had issues, can’t you look up what happened then” I die a little more inside. Or, worse yet, questions about now-decommissioned systems and what happened to the data that used to be inside them. “Oh, no one will want to know about that after the decommission is done” is my instant rant trigger when I hear it.

      1. JustaTech*

        Every time we switch controlled document systems at my company, some of the metadata gets stripped out. (We’re on our 5th system since I started.)

        The last move stripped out some important things, like the authors. Which used to be their own page of the document, but that was stripped out too. And I get that it shouldn’t matter who wrote the report calibrating the freezer, but on some of the older reports that are actually experiments, you really do need to know if they were written by Mr Doesn’t Understand Statistics or Dr N of One Is Fine. Also, it would be good to know if this report on Widget X is from 2002, 2012, or 2022, but often that data is missing as well.

    5. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      Anybody who stores code of any sort in OneNote, whether or not it’s shared, should not be allowed anywhere near a programming job.

      2. Grenelda Thurber*

        OneNote isn’t a source code control system. Even Microsoft would tell him that. How do people like this stay employed?

        1. Programmer for decades*

          When you are a programmer in a business group not allowed to use git or any other real repository, Onenote is better than chicken scratches. Give me the tools and I’ll use them. Refuse me the tools because I am not official IT member and I’ll do the best I can. That OneNote is saved on the lan, so backed up twice daily. And I make sure to save off version control once a week.

          I would gleefully rant on how clueless your statement is, but would simply instead submit that in a perfect world, you would be right. /add copious sarcasm here

    6. Frustrated*

      A company that changed settings in SharePoint so the site can’t be shared with anyone outside the org meaning emailing documents. Would have been better if there had been some type of formal request process to add externals.

    7. Old Hampshire New Hampshire*

      I feel your pain. I’m running a ‘local guidance amnesty’ at the moment where people can send me docs they’ve been keeping on their local drives (or, in one instance, a print out they’ve been annotating for years) so I can review them and decide whether they should be added onto our centralised knowledge system. I’ve tried to pitch it as ‘you’ve all got some really helpful stuff we’d like to share with everyone!’, but it’s mainly an excuse to get everyone to dump the rubbish from their virtual filing cabinets. A few people have refused because it’s ‘their knowledge’. Nope! It belongs to the business, now hand it over!

  22. MsM*

    I worked for an organization that had one very powerful (and expensive) but not online-friendly CRM to track constituent records and payments, and another cloud-based one that could also have handled those functions, but was only there to process online payments and integrate with our blast emails. These two systems refused to talk to each other without a complicated multistep import/export process that unsurprisingly introduced a lot of errors. Did we decide to switch over to the cloud-based CRM? No! Instead, we signed a three-year contract with the first CRM company for a supposed integration solution that did not work, hired an IT person specifically to try and sort that mess out, and only when that failed was management willing to consider streamlining.

  23. CSRoadWarrior*

    At my previous job, our accounting software was DOS based. I literally mean DOS like the 1980s. And this was 2021. There was no changing it.

    We could not use a mouse and had to use the F keys to navigate. What made it worse was that the software could not close the books properly like in modern software like QuickBooks or NetSuite. That means hypothetically, something as back as 20 years or further could be changed. For anyone not familiar with accounting, when you close the books, you could not alter any information in prior months. It is locked from editing. This way, financial information stays accurate.

    Let’s just say the books were a complete mess. Nobody said anything and there were no plans to change the software. I eventually left; I only lasted 5 weeks there. The DOS was not the reason, but why I left is a story for another day.

    3. Nicosloanica*

      Haha our books are also incredibly messy at my org and I don’t really understand how it can be impossible to fix them. It’s not my area, but I suspect it’s something like this.

    4. AuntieV*

      My first job out of high school had a DOS based accounting software (actually most of my jobs until like 2010 had DOS based systems). I got weirdly proficient in these systems and was genuinely sad when I no longer needed those skills.

      However, using the keyboard to navigate for so long has made me exceptionally proficient in PC gaming. :)

    5. jam*

      I worked in the ticket office for a major tour company in the 2010s and our Ticketmaster system was DOS. Yet another reason to dislike TM.

    6. TheActualA*

      Ugh, I’m so sorry. My last job wasn’t quite this painful (close though!) but my team told me the accounting software had been DOS-based until a few years ago. Without that piece of information, I would not have been able to pull “reports” which I figured out would not pull if you gave them a file name longer than eight characters, just like in the DOS days.

      At one point, they MAILED us the “software update” on CDs. No one in the office had optical drives.

      There was ledger/subledger disagreement everywhere–the main operating bank account was off by $500k. It had the worst controls of any system I’ve ever seen. I managed to get Sage Intacct implemented except for some historical data before I left and when the CEO of the Horrible Accounting Software company found out we were canceling, he very earnestly called me and told me he was quite concerned that we wouldn’t find the functionality of their software anywhere else as they had done so much custom work for us.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        The horrible part is that the “custom work” often does stop software upgrades in their tracks; or worse, the new system gets implemented, but the old system still hangs around for that one little tiny bit of functionality.

        The custom functionality is frequently weird, insane and/or illegal, but heaven forbid you try to take that button away from an end-user who’s had it for ten years.

    7. spcepickle*

      We also have legacy DOS based systems, green screens with our logo spelled created from letters and the space key.

    8. captainbartlet*

      Ah, DOS… I currently work in a business where we keep our inventory database in a DOS based-system where records can be overwritten EXTREMELY easily. Being able to verify our sales history is actually very important to our work but we often have to overwrite individual inventory records to update them due to how the elderly owner likes to process new inventory – and the owner insists he’s got it all in his head. Or claims the information can be found in the literal card catalog we still use for inventory in addition to the DOS (importantly, sales history is not tracked in this card catalog). I believe the program was officially last updated in 2003 (when I was in preschool!) by a guy who then moved to the other side of the world and is also no longer alive, but our version is from the mid-90s. I think we are the only store in our industry still running this program, and the younger staff here are trying desperately to figure out to convert the data to a popular open-access inventory system that our competitors use but like… we do not know or understand the DOS.

    9. Unkempt Flatware*

      From someone who still plays Zork on her family’s DOS computer from 1985, I am jealous. I haven’t used DOS for work since 2003. BTW, the 1985 computer has never been repaired or updated or anything. Not even a dust rag has touched that beast. I love her.

      1. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        I have an Apple IIe and an Apple Iic in my office that can both still play Oregon Trail, if I wasn’t afraid the 5.25″ floppy discs would wear out from use.

        1. 8-bit binary*

          There are devices made by hobbyists now, like the floppy emu that can store disk images and still run on original hardware.

          I have a CFFA, but sadly, they’ve been discontinued.

    10. Overthinking it*

      Yeah, but so I loved F-keys in WordPerfect, not having to go back and forth between keyboard and mouse! That, and split screen for seeing the codes in the documents. I loved WordPerfect. It was like an old friend, fired to make room for the boss’ nephew, who could NEVER do the job as well. Sigh!

      2. Old Hampshire New Hampshire*

        My dad’s office used WordPerfect and I loved it! After school, I would go to his office because it was round the corner. I used to type up my dad’s teams reports in it much faster than they could because of the F-keys (and I’d taught myself to touch type). In return, they would do my science homework for me, which might explain why I didn’t do very well in science in secondary school.

  24. Lemon Squeezy*

    I once worked for a psychiatrists office that only did paper prescriptions (this was in the mid-2010s). Because we had a lot of patients with ADHD the doctor prescribed a lot of controlled substances. We had to buy special paper that couldn’t be copied, and then print the prescriptions for the doctor to sign and mail out reoccuring prescriptions every month. This was a HUGE monthly undertaking, but the doctor who owned the practice was older and adamantly did not want to move to any sort of an electronic system, because she had heard that EHR systems were “crazymaking” for other doctors. Maybe worse than the paper prescriptions, we tracked the monthly prescriptions in a huge Excel spreadsheet with patient data that went back years. It was password locked but honestly it was a HIPAA violation waiting to happen. We only changed to an electronic prescription database a few months before I left that job, because Arizona changed its laws about how controlled substances had to be prescribed (namely, only digitally).

    1. Sociology rocks!*

      At least you mailed them too people! As a kid my pediatrician would only do paper prescriptions for my adhd meds, but insisted someone had to physically come and pick them up from her office. I was so glad when I outgrew her and switched to a provider with modern technology!

      1. Blarg*

        My mother’s doctor did this with opioid prescriptions back in the early aughts. But would mail like six months at a time. My mother the addict would alter them to fill early sometimes. Got caught once. Doctor, who was violating the regulations with the six individual monthly Rx at a time, threw her under the bus until they came back to him asking questions and then he said he must have made a mistake.

        Anyway, electronic ordering is good and helps prevent these shenanigans. My mother eventually died of a fentanyl overdose — that was technically legally prescribed. I was amazed it took her as long as she did.

      2. Thinking*

        In NC when my children were children, the law would not allow mailing controlled substance prescriptions. Too much chance someone would know this random-looking envelope held a script and steal it. I had to drive across town for them.
        But then insurance decided to bypass local pharmacies for a huge wholesale place in the Southwest. Scripts had to be mailed there in envelopes that made it obvious this was a script. And somehow That wasn’t a problem. I checked with the State regulators and was told both things were true.

    2. Galadriel's Garden*

      I’m just thinking about how…problematic a physical paper prescription could be to someone with ADHD (I’m speaking from experience here), given how easy it would be to misplace and/or forget, rather than it being submitted automatically and digitally…

      1. Paint N Drip*

        Imagine getting something vital to your ADHD processing IN THE MAIL, ON PAPER – hilarious joke! Right…?

        1. JustaTech*

          The number of times my paper prescription expired before I managed to fill it…

          Also how I learned that there is *one* 24 hour pharmacy in this city (that isn’t inside a hospital).

        2. Wolf*

          Greetings from Germany. We can get ADHD medication prescriptions for a few months, but we have to pick up the paper and carry it to the pharmacy. You can guess how often people miss the dates to do that.

      2. Coffee*

        I always walked straight from doctor’s office to my pharmacy and they stored the paperwork – but after that I was able to get meds only from that one place!

    3. Tau*

      I, uh.

      How to put this.

      …so my country is in the digital Stone Age and my first thought was “but how ELSE would you get prescriptions other than on paper?”

      (And I actually do get prescriptions for ADHD meds, which is a major hassle. I did recently encounter my very first electronic prescription for something else, but I doubt that it’s possible for the controlled substances because electronic prescriptions are Change and we must be Suspicious Of Change and stick with Tried And True Methods that have always worked in the past. Like paper, and also fax – at this point I figure Germany is keeping the fax machine manufacturers in business all on its own.)

      1. amoeba*

        Hahaha, are we from the same country, by any chance? I’m very used to prescriptions being something on paper that you have to pick up at the doctor’s office in person…

    4. NothingIsLittle*

      My old psychiatrist’s office did paper prescriptions, also a lot of ADHD, but this was only 2 years ago! Granted, I’m 90% sure it was so they could charge $50 to replace those prescriptions when they were inevitably lost…

      1. Meow*

        It’s only been extremely recently that many states have allowed controlled substances to be filled any way other than by physically transporting a piece of paper. As of 4 years or so ago, my state now allows them to be faxed, because that’s still the gold standard for medical security for whatever reason.

  25. Peanut Hamper*

    At my old job,everything got printed out.

    I had a coworker who would get a price quote, print it out, make a note on it with a pen, and then scan it. She would then toss the original print out. If she needed to make an additional quote, she would print it out again, make another note on it, and re-scan it. Repeat ad infinitum.

    After she left, I was cleaning out her cube and found a cheat sheet for printing things. It was basically:

    Microsoft Word: File menu, then “Print”
    Microsoft Excel: File menu, then “Print”
    etc.

    I had another coworker who emailed me to ask if I had completed a simple task. I responded “Yes.” Keep in mind that my desk was just outside her door, and she literally could have just called out to me to ask the same thing.

    Later, after she left and we were cleaning out her office, I discovered that she had printed out my email saying “Yes” not once, not twice, but three times.

    After most of the original crew were gone, we eventually went almost completely paperless. It was a relief.

    1. HonorBox*

      I worked with someone who did this too. File folders in Outlook? No way. Print all the messages out throughout the entire email conversation.

    3. 1-800-BrownCow*

      All that is hilarious!

      But also, I kinda understand the coworker emailing you instead of calling out her question. I share an office with 2 of my direct reports and we often email/Teams message one another questions or requests. Yes, all we need to do is just speak up, but we get so many interruptions throughout the day that it’s just better sometimes to send a message on the computer. Also, if I’m super focused on something, I like not having my concentration broken with someone asking me a question. I get that interruptions are going to happen, but sending me an email or Teams chat is nice as I can finish up what I’m focused on and then jump over to the email/message. Additionally, I’m an introvert and I have to do a lot of talking and interacting in my job. Sometimes when I have a question for one of my officemates, I’m just not in the mood to talk. I can send them a message and keep going about my business, while staying silent.

      1. Peanut Hamper*

        That office was as silent as a sepulchre. It was spooky until most of the old crew moved on and we got a radio in there.

        I really wish this person had been an introvert. She was far too free with her opinions, especially political ones. One of her big issues was that poor people shouldn’t get free turkeys or hams for the holidays.

        I did not mind seeing her go.

    4. iglwif*

      In a previous job, leadership at a client organization turned over and the outgoing person presented my boss with OVER A DOZEN LARGE 3-RING BINDERS filled with printouts of every. single. email exchange that had taken place between her and us over the course of her term, which she said we would of course want to pass along to the next person. (Note: there was a dedicated email address for this role, which the next person would inherit. Unless she’d deleted them all, the same emails would be in there.)

      My boss had an incredible poker face, and she must’ve really needed it that day!

      1. Generic Name*

        This reminds me of my first job out of grad school in 2004, and my predecessor had actually printed out entire websites and put them in 3-ring binders. Pretty much just like that Dilbert cartoon. I threw all of that crap away.

        1. Gumby*

          I actually would not be sad if I had printed out a few web sites that now no longer exist. Even the wayback machine doesn’t have everything. Here I’m thinking specifically of some of the recaps on TWoP. Though I would have copied everything into Word probably to save on paper.

          1. Ally McBeal*

            I have PDF and/or Word copies of my favorite articles from The Toast and The Hairpin. This was a prescient move because Hairpin went down for several months last year (I’d been featured in an article, went to my bookmarks to find it, and ended up being the one to tell the former editor that the site was down when I asked if she might have a backup of the article somewhere). I dread the day The Toast is taken down for good because the commentariat was uniformly outstanding and I only PDFed the content of the articles themselves.

  26. Helmac*

    Not so much a system, but the executive of our division died in office more than 5 years ago (not unexpected), and their office is still completely intact. The new executive preferred to use a different office. The family wants to donate the considerable personal library from this office (and home office), but there is no place that is equipped to accept a donation of hundreds of books (my sister is a librarian and confirms that no libraries want these huge donations, even if there are some rare and valuable books within them). So, this huge office sits mostly unused, except for booking for occasional meetings since it has a big conference table.

    1. Nicosloanica*

      Oh man I wish I was in your area, as our AAUW does a big book sale every year and would be happy to take a load and sort through them to get the ones of value.

      1. Helmac*

        It’s possible that such a recipient exists in the area, but no one has the bandwidth (apparently) to make all the calls that would be required. And, no one wants to take ALL the books, which is apparently the desire of the family. Though at this point, I wonder if they have totally forgotten about the existence of this orphan library, all the personal knick knacks, and other things still exactly where they were left in the office. We do use the room for meetings sometimes, but it is like being in a shrine.

    2. HonorBox*

      I feel for the family, but this is far beyond reasonable. A few months? OK. But more than five years and there’s space sitting unused? I can’t even imagine.

      1. Helmac*

        There is also some cult of personality at play, since the key decision makers to clean out the space also worked with this executive for literal decades. But, at this point the majority of the staff never even overlapped with their tenure, which makes it all the stranger to have this unintentional shrine holding down the corner office.

    4. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

      My library would accept those kind of donations with the caveat that we would not commit to keeping them (usually 50-90% would go to surplus and would be bought by used book dealers). Some families would try to push for keeping the collection together and walk away when we wouldn’t budge. Fine by us. The library did have one such collection that predated my time there and it was a hassle keeping them together. When we lost the room they were kept in during a move, it ended up on some shelves in Special Collections and is only technically a separate collection with the name of the old room (named after the donor) in the library catalog records.

      1. Helmac*

        I think that originally the hope was that the library would be kept together, and that some place would be excited to have it. By the time it became clear that it just isn’t going to work like that, it seems to have just become a status quo. In the end, I’m sure we’ll have to pay for movers to come and box up these books, take them somewhere that wants to make their selections and sell off the rest. Exactly what should have happened in the first 6 months. I don’t even know if there is still resistance to doing so, other than the fact that we’re all overworked, and this is definitely an other-duties-as-assigned job (plus a pretty considerable expense, I’m sure).

    5. Zahra*

      They can’t donate the books in smaller batches? Say.. a hundred books very 6 months or so? Or whatever works for the place they want to donate to? After 5 years, that would probably have been the most efficient solution instead of doing nothing!

      1. Helmac*

        This is what I’m doing to thin down my own library! Nothing like as big, but after moving plenty of times and observing this situation, I never want to own shelves and shelves of books. If I need to do research, I use the library. I get my kindle books through Libby. I only keep physical books that I love to reread, that were written by friends, or that make me happy to have around in some kind of strong sentimental way. I feel like I’ve been donating and giving away books for years, and I still have so many more than I want to own!!

        1. Wolf*

          Same here. I have a shelf of books I like to re-read, and everything else is getting freecycled. Or sometimes gifted to a friend if I know they’ll enjoy it – but I tell them they’re free to regift my gifts any time, no obligation to keep anything.

        2. Dr Vibrissae*

          Similar. I keep books I’ve loved it that have a strong sentimental value, the rest get donated to the Friends of the Library who hold biannual book sales to raise funds for the library. I’m my old town there was a permanent small store front in addition to the regular sales where they had more valuable books.

  27. Nicosloanica*

    We have one of these right now. We basically have multiple CRM systems (like, contact databases) because my boss likes some features of one better for some things and some better for others. She does not “see” the problem. Honestly, it will never be fixed until she leaves because she’s not going to let anyone change her precious systems … but it is honestly so stupid, because one CRM knows that certain emails are being sent and whether the account is active, and another unconnected system knows who donated and has a record of their mailing address – but is also full of a bunch of other garbage that’s not being updated or maintained. Crosswalking between the two is basically impossible.

  28. Bird Lady*

    My first job working in my field landed me at a small historic site, hired as a young professional with the request to begin professionalizing our practices and workflows involving Public Relations. The first thing I did was create a Facebook account for the site, so we could share info about events and post images from our extensive digital image library. Since there was no real desire to upgrade our technology – I had to bring in my personal computer because the org refused to purchase one for me – all the images were saved on the computer of the Director of Community Engagement. To obtain an image for a post, I would need to request it from her. This usually meant sitting next to her while we looking through the images; she would spend the time berating me for changing the image of the organization and tell me that I was a terrible human and wanted her job. (Readers: I did not want her job. Going to other org’s events and galas was not remotely close to things I wanted to do.)

    When our ED retired, buying a server for file sharing was our new ED’s first priority. We spent days uploading our files onto the server. Most everyone on staff was thrilled! While I had a newer laptop (recent grad), most of my colleagues were using computers the org had purchased almost a decade ago. They barely worked and no one wanted to lose their work.

    All except the Director of Community Engagement. While she eventually and angrily uploaded the image files to the server, she created a policy in which any one who wanted to use them would still need to sit with her so she could “approve” their use. Which meant that, since it was usually me who needed the files, the abuse continued until she was fired.

    1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

      The irony of hoarding her institutional materials and knowledge to secure her job was undoubtedly lost on her. “They let me go because once they forced me to give access to my data they don’t need me anymore. I knew it!”

      1. Bird Lady*

        That’s exactly what she told people! The problem was that she was fired for one of two reasons: Stealing time or behaving in incredibly racist ways that eventually became a thing. Oh the stories I have on both counts!

        (Attention Readers: I did not get offered her job either.)

  29. ThatGirl*

    I worked for a consumer packaged goods brand that mostly had retail stores as customers – ranging from Amazon and Walmart to small mom & pop shops. The vast majority sent orders in electronically, but there were a handful of small retailers who would FAX in their orders, hand-written on an old-ass order form that they just kept making photocopies of. And half the time something was illegible and sales would have to call the customer up and go through each line to make sure the product skus and quantities were correct. This was in 2018!

    1. London Calling*

      I had a supplier a few years ago who would handwrite orders on a duplicate order form. When the invoice amounts due started to impact cash flow (usually after about a month) they’d bung a staple through them and send them to me in AP (actually they’d address them to someone who left five years ago and the invoices would skulk around the post room for a bit until someone noticed them and put them in my pigeon hole). Of course by this time payment was already due if not overdue and I had to check for purchase orders, get them raised if they didn’t exist and get them on a payment run; by which time they’d blocked supplies because hey, you haven’t paid us!! gee, I wonder why that is, Mr Supplier?

      Three of us – me, my LM and the executive director responsible for the department that used this supplier begged and pleaded with them for the love of all the accounting gods to just change the system. Send the invoices one at a time as baby steps! email them instead of posting them! ANYTHING, FGS!

      I left before it was resolved. Not because of that, but because of the new accounting software that made my job three times more complicated than it needed to me and among other things, closed purchase orders at random if we used a work around the company who sold it to us swore would work.

    2. JustaTech*

      My in-laws used to own a small distribution business that sold to retail stores. Some stores were very up to date with technology and sales and things, but there were a few who still wanted to do hand-written orders, and two guys who would pick up their order in person because they also paid cash. By the briefcase. (No, my in-laws did not sell drugs.)

      My husband was forever trying to drag them into the 21st century. Getting everything organized before they sold the business was miserable for everyone.

    3. for the love of god...*

      Could you have charged the faxing customers an inconvenience tax? I.e. offering them a “discount” if they switched to electronic ordering

  30. AuntieV*

    A job I worked for a brief time about 5 years ago (and it will become apparent why my tenure was brief) used spreadsheets for monitoring changes to installation schedules. But these spreadsheets were not kept in a central storage area like Sharepoint. Here was my day.

    Receive spreadsheet from installer contracting firm
    Update MY spreadsheet with this information
    Add any new installations to MY spreadsheet
    Use yet another spreadsheet to include any details about parts
    Send that spreadsheet back to the installer contracting firm
    Spend the day calling companies to let them know the installer would be out on X day, update MY spreadsheet accordingly.
    Receive an updated spreadsheet from installer contracting firm with install dates
    Update MY spreadsheet with install dates.
    End my day.

    That’s it, that was my whole day and this process? Took me maybe an hour and I had to be in the office every day with nothing to do and a CEO who lost his mind if I wasn’t doing something every second of the day. So they had me updating….more spreadsheets.

    The entire company ran on spreadsheets that were stored on people’s personal computers. It was MADNESS.

  31. anotherfan*

    We had an outside contributer who once upon a time was shown how to use a program on our system that allowed him to download a file from his home computer into our database via a stick. We moved away from that system but kept that one computer with the program still on it so he could come in once a week and put in the stick and download the file. We were able to email him but he refused to email his file to us, he insisted on coming in once a week and downloading the file. At one point, our IT people grabbed the cord that connected the old computer to the electric plug (IT was like that. They refused to buy a new cord, just kept canibalizing our working equipment) and there was hell to pay until we could find another cord — we may have actually bought one. All that changed when the company decided to close that office and open at a different location and that computer was … lost … during the transition. Eventually the contributer agreed to just email us the file, which is where we are today.

    2. Orv*

      I’m mostly surprised that IT was short on power cords. Everyone usually saves them from discarded computers, so eventually you end up with hundreds of them. I’ve recycled whole bins full of them from previous jobs.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        Depends how good people are at destroying them; laptop power cords in particular have a much shorter lifespan than the average laptop. At a past workplace the IT team put out a tongue-in-cheek guide “How to Destroy Your Laptop Power Cord” that recommended wrapping it really tightly around the power brick for maximum neatness and destruction.

  32. Scarlett*

    The Chron: A chronological record of every email, check, receipt, etc from every donor for our 40 person fundraising team. Each week the assistants on our team would make copies of everything and file them in the donor files and in The Chron (HALF our team were assistants bc ….of things like The Chron).

    Our donor files weren’t even actually filed….bc those files were being refiled and I think they were up to letter H. So they had to make copies and file them in temporary files. And of course The Chron.

    I worked there for 2 years in 2016. It was wild to me how much paper we went through every day…..in 2016.

    When I sat in an interview for my next role, the executive director reminisced about how he got his start on the same team. He then asked about The Chron.

    1. Keep it Simple*

      As a non-profit data / gift manager, this gives me nightmares. The happiest day of my life was when we got a desktop bank scanner and I no longer had to copy checks (which frankly is a security nightmare and no one should ever, ever be doing that.)

    2. Pippa*

      I hated the Chron. So much extra work and who ever looked at it anyway? I bet there are warehouses full of Chron files still moldering. Yikes.

    3. NoDramaMamaLlama*

      I am a non-profit fundraiser and I guarantee you I will have nightmares about this tonight. Even the term “The Chron” sounds threatening and like it might chase me through a darkened hallway. *shudder*

  33. Forever paperbased*

    My old boss (who was the company owner) was in her 70s and was incapable/unwilling to use the digital office calendar. If you wanted to book time off you had to email her with the dates you wanted off. Once approved this then you had to add it to the digital calendar as well as the communal wall planner she hung near her desk. I once forgot to write my holiday dates on the wall planner and she then promptly forgot that I had ever booked time off and booked herself a holiday on the exact same dates as me. We were the two most senior members of staff so us both being out of office for the same two weeks was not ideal to say the least.

  34. I Count the Llamas*

    Several years ago, I started at a new company and was promptly informed that a certain Excel workbook could not be changed or updated, AT ALL. You see, the CFO had set up this workbook 15 YEARS AGO and she would be very upset if she decided to randomly open it and saw something had changed. I cannot emphasize enough how ridiculous it was that she would ever need to open this file – this company employed a little less than 1k people and there were 4 managers/executives in between our roles.

    This workbook was used for a monthly process and had years’ worth of tabs and data in it. It was incredibly unstable and crashed constantly. I once asked if I could at least delete all of the tabs that were more than a year old. My managers had a meeting with a couple of executives to discuss the situation and what the CFO might do if she ever found out… And it was finally decided that the risk of her wrath was just too great and ABSOLUTELY NO CHANGES could be made.

    That was one small slice of the massive disfunction at that company.

  35. Anonymous in WI*

    This is my entire industry (clinical research). the FDA and EMA regulations have been interpreted one way, based on tools/tech from the last century, and everyone is afraid to change anything, despite obvious tech advances and changes in patient perceptions.

  36. Anon for This*

    At a previous job (government contractor, so government adjacent, but with extra penny-pinching), nearly 20 years ago, we used an Access database to keep track of publications. (It had replaced a spreadsheet, and worked pretty well, until we had too many records/publications, and occasionally a record would become corrupt.) We asked for a content management system (CMS).

    Instead we got:

    1. A homemade Oracle database brought in by the business we had bought to be competitive for contract bids. We couldn’t pull the reports we needed, and the person who made the database was long gone, so nobody knew how to do any substantive changes to it. We had to use it, because a different department used it to assign certain federal requirements (there was often a publication aspect).

    2. OnBase, which had been purchased for different needs (keeping track of discrete people records). Leadership was tired of “buying a bunch of different systems for different reasons,” so we started receiving internal requests for publication through it. Unfortunately, we also couldn’t pull the reports we needed, and still had to get some items through email. And download to a drive.

    3. DomDoc, which was one of the worst document management systems I’ve ever used. Luckily, it was only used for SOPs, etc. Purely internal and universally hated.

    4. MS Access, which we never stopped using, even though it stopped being supported, because none of the other systems did what we needed.

    5. In my last year, we did get a CMS, but only for our website. Listserv and bulletins still were on their own.

    I know from a former coworker that all these systems were still in use a few years ago, long after I left.

    I now work in an actual government agency, and we do have some very old and outdated legacy systems that would cost a lot to replace, but no entire department has to use them for all their work.

  37. Name Anxiety*

    I was the first degreed librarian to be hired at a special library (think very specific collection for a specialized purpose). When I got there, we had to move into a new building, and we had to keep the books in order. They were classified using the Dewey Decimal System which has any number of problems anyway, but whatever, shouldn’t have mattered. EXCEPT! This is a super specialized collection, meaning that basically every book could be classified using the exact same number if, say, you were a library student working on a class project and then just left at the end of the term and the assistant staff just continued along in the same way. Imagine, a whole library dedicated to fungi. It would include cookbooks, history books, science texts, biographies of famous fungus researchers etc. and every single book needs to be shelved in some order so that they could be retrieved/discovered by library users but the student who added the numbers just decided that they were all “mushroom books” and labeled them all with “579” and called it good.
    The library assistants knew this didn’t actually work, so they shelved the books in collections like “recipes”, “crafts”, “history”, “local”, etc. on different shelves but since the numbers were all the same, they were really just organized based on vibes. When we had to move the collection they thought I was crazy because I said we would not be doing that any more and needed to formalize the different collections because we actually could do that, but it involved relabeling every single book before we could put anything on our new shelves. I think my brand new manager (this was my second week of work) was slightly horrified to see the brand new library building with tiny labeled piles of books spread out all over the floor, but I recently visited (10+ years later) their remodeled library and they’ve maintained my system even with other qualified librarians in charge!

    2. Kimmy Schmidt*

      What is UP with the insistence on using classic cataloging systems (where everything is all the same) in special library collections? Bless you for making a better system.

    4. Ludd-ish*

      “Organized based on vibes.” LOL! As someone who was an assistant in a specialized graduate school library, that checks out.

    5. Fíriel*

      Well, at least you didn’t get stuck in ‘original order’ hell like many archivists are (not that I’m speaking from experience or anything :/ ) so it could always be worse! I understand why we have these policies for historical reasons, but how hellish that sometimes I have to preserve someone’s obvious filing mistake from like the 80s.

        1. Cthulhu’s Librarian*

          It does, sometimes. The theory is that original order preserves the intent of the person/organization which originally compiled the records, and can yield valuable insights into how the documents and artifacts were understood by their original users. Once an archivist decides to break that construction and order materials as they see fit, future researchers have no real ability to reconstruct it, and may draw mistaken connections.

          This can be vitally important to avoid if, for instance, you’re working with a collection that is compiled by members of a non-dominant culture, who may be organizing material in a culturally relevant way you don’t have the context to understand. Or a collection that mixes artifacts with documents. If you encounter a pressed flower or embroidered patch inside a text, separating it from that text potentially severs it of meaning.

          But if you are dealing with a file cabinet where every folder is “real estate transactions, year (blank)” and they’re all in sequential order for 300 years, except 1569 and 1596 have been swapped… that’s the sort of thing you could probably document in your records and revert, since the original intent seems fairly clear. Many archivists will refrain from doing so, however, because they don’t want to risk injecting their biases into the collection.

    8. Seal*

      As a fellow librarian, I can say with absolute certainty that this is not an anomaly. Early in my career I took over a specialized library that had recently moved to a new space. The new director didn’t process new items, so no one knew the library had them, and stashed them wherever there was room. The staff knew where everything was in the old space, but since the move was done with minimal planning, no one knew where anything was anymore. There were a dozen or so sets of shelving for oversized items that had been set up in a different configuration than in the old space. Rather than put the oversized items in call number order, they were put back on the same set of shelves they were on in the old space. To find anything, you had to consult a hand drawn map that showed what call number range was on each set of shelves, but there were no instructions posted that you had to do so. There were many more convoluted policies and procedures that were never documented and not intuitive; as a result, few people used the library.

      It took YEARS to unravel this mess and make the collection usable. A few of the long-time staff members pushed back, but I kept telling them we couldn’t have an organization scheme that only exists in someone’s head and we had a responsibility to be good stewards of the collection. Although I left that job a number of years ago, I occasionally run into a former colleague or two who tell me that library is still going strong thanks to everything I put in place.

    9. Youth Librarian*

      This makes me feel better about my very first cataloging job, at the age of 16, when I hauled boxes of books from a church/school library to the main office so I could look up their records in Library of Congress. I was pretty much making it up based on what I’d seen while browsing other library’s catalogs, but even so I still did better than the previous volunteer cataloger who, among other things, put all the Eyewitness books under 500. (this is an old nonfiction series that issued books on a wide variety of subjects, only a few of which could be categorized as science…)

  38. Spacewoman Spiff*

    Suspect this is a COMMON scenario, but I used to work at a nonprofit where, despite having Salesforce, almost every team used their own spreadsheets to track contact information, outreach, etc., for their constituents. These were secret spreadsheets not available in shared folders. At times our work overlapped and I would have to ask another team for the spreadsheet of, say, people who were currently in our program…but I discovered you couldn’t trust these, because sometimes the spreadsheets were touched by people who didn’t know how to use them and did things like sort just the column with phone numbers, and no one on the team responsible noticed because they all had those phone numbers programmed into their phones. (Ask me how I discovered! A nightmare!) Other times, multiple teams would be talking to the same people, everyone clueless about who else was contacting them. Every team was very attached to their spreadsheets, because they wanted to maintain ownership of the information they tracked. I spent a lot of time trying to coax people towards using Salesforce, and was finally making some headway when I was laid off. I assume they are still running things off dozens of secret, inaccurate spreadsheets.

    1. MsM*

      Ugh. We have way too many systems and spreadsheets right now, but at least we share them. And are working on picking an integrated system (which will probably end up being Salesforce).

  39. Who knows*

    I’m a data analyst. I’m constantly encountering people who are resistant to using an actual database because “it’s easier to just type free text in Excel.” Yes, easier for YOU, but if I can’t analyze it, then there’s no point.

    1. sigh*

      OMG This !!!!
      SO MUCH This !!!
      “Yes it makes sense to you, but the computer won’t understand it”

    2. MigraineMonth*

      When I’m doing requirements gathering, I ask, “Do you want this to be a free text field, or do you want to be able to use the data?”

      Weirdly, they still say free text 80% of the time, but at least they understand it can’t be used for reporting, alerts, record linking or anything else.

  40. Juneau*

    Our head office rolled out a new portal system for a certain process. This is a highlight reel of how the rollout went.

    – They didn’t solicit feedback from any of the branches prior to the portal going live. It is optimised for HO’s relevant department (a team of five people in a centralised location) and honestly borderline unusable for the branches (all over Canada).
    – Training was not recorded for reasons [image not available]. Anyone who missed it was out of luck.
    – The IT staff who put it together do not have English as their first language. Plenty of people who are ESL can communicate seamlessly in the language; this is not the case of that particular team, which means that the Portal is riddled with grammatical errors no one seems to care to fix. My favourite was “modifity” instead of “modified by”.
    – Even though it is for uploading documentation (particularly hefty contracts), there is an upload limit of 20 mbs and four files. There is no reason for this. It just is and will not change.
    – Whenever we receive documentation back, we receive two emails: one that says “file updated, see attached document” and another that, uh, actually has the attached document being referenced in the first email. There is no reason for this. It just is and will not change.
    – To get really petty, the Portal tells us at the branch level that we are submitting approval for X, Y, and Z… when it actuality we are requesting X, Y, and Z be reviewed and approved. It’s like someone wilfully referring to addition as subtraction and subtraction as addition.
    – tldr I hate it. Thank you for coming to my normal one disguised as an AAM comment.

    1. Ialwaysforgetmyname*

      “Modifity” sounds like one of those ridiculous and trendy apps that don’t do anything useful.

        1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

          Sounds like a weight-loss drug for sure! If you suffer any of these side effects — nausea, vomiting, headache, rash, difficulty breathing, tiny llamas, popping of your face, or death — contact your medical provider immediately.

    2. ScruffyInternHerder*

      This sounds like nearly every process tracking application I’ve ever met in the AEC space. It won’t integrate with any department’s software (design, contracting, anything), never behaves the way we expect it to, and “okay find we’ll freaking break it to prove our point” is typically the result. Rinse and repeat.

  41. Professional_Lurker*

    One of my clients was an art museum where each department (registrar, conservation, curators, etc.) kept their own files on each artwork. Physical files, 80% of which were photocopies of other departments’ notes on said artwork. Any suggestion that the files be concatenated and digitized was vehemently rejected with “Conservation/Curators/Exhibits/etc. doesn’t need this.” Again, roughly 80% of any given file was borrowed from the other departments. If I pushed, Conservation and Curators even started talking about how “dangerous” or “harmful” it could be if their notes were able to be accessed by outsiders. Outsiders within the same museum, I remind you. Not the general public.

    4. NothingIsLittle*

      I work in museums and WOW this is true! All files are supposed to be saved to the shared drive because info security/life happens/don’t replicate research. Instead, everyone keeps everything saved locally and shares by email with duplicate copies. As someone who needs access to a lot of the exhibit files and research, it’s infuriating.

      And don’t get me started on having everything saved three times over in different places because our file paths are a complete mess!

    5. MigraineMonth*

      Amazing. I’ve been in companies with friction between departments, but never ones in a state of cold war.

  42. anonymous anteater*

    I look forward to hate-reading all these stories!

    Mine is from another breeding ground of ridiculous ways, academia. I spent 5 years in a department doing my PhD. When we hosted invited seminar speakers, two students were obligated to prepare a pot of coffee, and put out some cookies and coffee cups, and load the dishwasher after. They also had to ask around to designate the next two students. Inevitably, the flakier colleagues would claim their turn had been recent, or they happened to be out of town for the next seminar.
    I wanted to keep a simple list to ensure everyone does their turn. For 3 years people told me it had been tried before and it hadn’t worked. At some point I was senior enough and out of patience with this inefficient non-system that I started a list. We got every student into a regular rotation and lo and behold, it worked.

    1. Moths*

      Sorry, completely unrelated to the topic, but that just brought back such negative memories from my PhD studies! I hate how students are utilized like that. I remember before my first committee meeting, my PI telling me that it was customary for the student to bring snacks and coffee for the committee and I literally thought he was joking. You’ve got a PhD student on a measly salary now having to spend money and time setting up a snack spread for professors who will then take two crackers and nothing else. Ugh. I don’t hate everything about academia, but there are some things that just get my hackles up!

      1. anonymous anteater*

        this one wasn’t as bad, supplies were purchased by the admins. In hindsight, I view this as being part of a team, not that different from pitching in with lab cleanup, or open house day. Maybe it was also a subconscious effort to make putting your stuff in the dishwasher everyone’s job, and not the admins’. Once we got the proper distribution going it was maybe 2 hours of work per year, not even worth dodging if you ask me.

      2. Gloaming*

        Ugh. Need to do that this week. Add in dietary restrictions, a meeting all the way through lunch, and no clear headcount for the defense and I’m planning to just order sandwich & fruit trays to make the problem go away. This is the last thing that grad students want or need to be worrying about on the day of their defense.

  43. Catabodua*

    I work at a University which has been running for over 100 years. There are so many things, I couldn’t even imagine where to start answering this.

  44. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

    Two come to mind – both about time recording (which seems to be ripe for this kind of inefficiency for some reason:

    1. At an old job we had a “time and attendance” system where you had a fob thing to swipe into a machine, which was OK in itself, but the UI for managers to override “violations” (tardy etc) was archaic and required pressing various F-keys that you had to memorise… There could be no deviations from this system. Even salaried office people and highly paid engineers (it was primarily a manufacturing environment) had to be fitted into this system and assigned a “shift”. I was coded as late back from lunch, no show etc when I had things like off site meetings. My manager who was a c-level exec had to override and “ok” these violations every time. The irony is I’d been taken on in part to drive process efficiencies and change. It will be a surprise to no one that I didn’t succeed.

    2. At a different old job we didn’t have to “clock in” but we did have to complete time sheets. Not a billable hours environment but it was wanted for project tracking etc, which is fair. The old time recording system wasn’t the best but we could work with it. Then a new one was introduced as part of a HR system upgrade. So then we had to record all time in both places and it became someone’s job to reconcile line by line every week that the two sets of entries were the same and chase down any discrepancies. They didn’t have exactly the same list of codes as those were maintained separately in both places, etc. We couldn’t get rid of the old system because there was some downstream process relying on it which no-one knew how to change.

  45. The Dude Abides*

    I work in government, but my worst example comes from before then.

    Small, family-owned construction company literally run out of the owner’s house. A few examples

    – invoices had to be typed out on a typewriter
    – reports and checks had to be physically printed on a dot matrix printer
    – related to above, I had to attach a check lead before printing checks
    – for payroll, I had to enter the data on a *different* computer, print the paper checks, and then deposit the paper checks at the bank in order to fund payroll
    – this process had to be completed two business days prior to payday, which was every Friday for the laborers, and 15th/30th for office

    I took the job because I needed something to help pay my half of the mortgage, and it’s my biggest regret – I was making $38k in 2017 (with a Masters and several years’ experience), and driving 40 minutes each way for the privilege of doing so. Thank god I found something better after seven months, as within six months of me leaving, the owner died and the company folded.

  46. KayZee*

    Our accounting department creates required forms in Word so that we have to download, fill in, save and attach. The rest of the organization uses Google Forms and has for probably 8 years. Dudes, it makes its own spreadsheet!

  47. I just work here*

    I work in higher ed. We have five (5!) software systems for dealing with student advising and are required to document in 3-4 of them whenever a student makes a change to their degree plan or course selection. Every few years, administration decides the old platform isn’t aging enough and introduces a new one, but we are required to continue using the old platform as well “just in case.” The administration wonders why student advisors have a bad attitude about tech.

  48. Be Gneiss*

    I work in food manufacturing. At ExJob, the owners and the plant manager were fixated on using scales from the 1960s and would not update to digital scales. These scales were fussy and temperamental, got knocked out of calibration if they were moved around or bumped, and were terrible to use. I fought and argued and made case after case for why we should switch to digital scales. The main objection? If the power goes out, digital scales won’t work and we’d have to shut down the line.
    Except all of the production equipment ran on electricity. If the power went out, *none* of the production line was running, and we didn’t need scales.

  49. Nicosloanica*

    I thought of a second one. When I first started with my org, we used to have a Tuesday staff meeting. Pretty routine, NBD, except I thought 1.5 hours was a bit weird for a team of six. The meeting was, as you can predict, very stupid. We did have an agenda, but it was just each “department” rambling on about stuff, and sometimes two people needed to hash something out but the rest of us certainly didn’t need to be there. My boss was also famously unavailable so for his direct reports, this was their main time to get his input on stuff – but again, not something the rest of us needed to sit around for. It was incredibly draining and rarely limited to 1.5 hours, either. New staff would come on and I’d watch the light drain from their eyes as they realized what kind of place this was. The worst thing is, we’ve had a mass exodus since then. There’s currently only two of us left … but my boss still keeps the meeting, with the same agenda, on the calendar every week. For just us two. SMDH.

    1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

      Ugh, we had a meeting like that during the pandemic…EVERY DAY. It was scheduled for an hour, but was often two. In addition to all the types of blather captured above, my boss would also tell personal stories and make everyone else tell personal stories to make sure we were OK. I’m sure she was just bored, but it was a lot. We were able to WFH but had more work/third party deadlines than ever, so giving up half the morning for this blah-blah was a LOT. Thankfully it only lasted until we were brought back in-office…in June 2020…mixed blessing to be sure. *eyeroll*

    2. MigraineMonth*

      My first week at one job, our 45-minute team meeting ran an hour over. I soon learned this was not at all atypical. There was simply no way to get my manager to stop talking. Hints didn’t work. Making an agenda didn’t work. Saying we were out of time didn’t work. He just talked.

      My solution was to schedule a meeting 15 minutes after any meeting he was in so that I had an excuse to hang up on him. Then I decided that having work to do was enough of an excuse to not listen to my boss ramble and just left meetings at their end time even if I didn’t have anything scheduled. It never seemed to bother my boss; I assume he just kept talking to no-one after I left.

  50. Blarg*

    In 2016, I inherited a filing system at a state agency that involved things either being paperclipped or stapled, depending on their progress through a multi-step system. Of course, the paperclips got stuck to papers they shouldn’t have been stuck to and things got mixed up or missed as a result.

    We received lab reports mailed from a lab, some with urgent-ish result but all needing follow0up. In the mail. The person retiring would write down her notes, and then type them into the lab’s note system, and then print them (and either paperclip or staple, see above).

    Fortunately, I was allowed to change all of that, rapidly. The lab was emailing everyone else their results daily, and was relieved to no longer need to physically mail ours. I was able to stop generating new paper by not printing everything, and was able to scan in and shred several file cabinets worth of old files, most of which were just the hand written and printed out copies of a thing that existed digitally and had to be stored that way for up to 70 years, depending on the result.

  51. That's Ranuculus*

    When I transitioned from one enrollment management office to another on campus 9 years ago, my new office had a spot outside of everyone’s office for them to place a print-out of their weekly outlook calendar. I came from an office where our internal IT guy had made the outlook default settings so that everyone could view the high level, but not the details, of appointments. The IT guy in the office I joined said such a setting wasn’t possible and that it was impossible to enforce everyone adjusting their settings so that we could all view each other’s calendars. So people printed their calendars every Monday morning and hung them next to their door.

    Do you print a new one if you get a new meeting request during the week? What about if you end up needing to be out unexpectedly? No guidance, no rules.

    I just quietly refused to do any printing. And it was never a problem. We had a new director start about 2 months after me and she asked, as a fellow newcomer, is there anything that surprised me coming into the office. I didn’t take a full breath before I said “OMG WHY ARE PEOPLE PRINTING CALENDARS?”

    The calendar printing lasted about another 14 months, though following my and the director’s lead, new people just never printed them out and the calendar sheets slowly started to disappear. Was there ever a office wide change to the outlook settings? No. So each new person has to be instructed to change their outlook settings and some don’t and it’s a PITA.

  52. Bruce*

    My father was a US Navy officer from the 50s to the early 70s, he told me that he had offended a few people along the way and limited his career. One time he was commanding a small base on the east coast, he received a memo from an office in the Pentagon that can be summarized as: “The CNO has directed that the Navy reduce the storage of un-needed records. You are ordered to reduce the storage of un-needed records, and to file a quarterly report on your progress in this activity.” My father sent a memo back to ask if filing the quarterly report was possibly contributing to the storage of un-needed records. This did not land well! That and a few other things seemed to put a ceiling on his rank advancement, and he was lucky to not be pushed out in a RIF before he retired…

  53. Chirpy*

    A former job had a coworker who was an actual hoarder, confirmed by someone who had seen her home, and it was pretty obvious which car was hers. How this manifested at work was that she would not throw out boxes, old scraps of label paper, etc., and her portion of the warehouse was absolutely overrun, floor to ceiling, with junk, and nobody could ever find anything. But if you even recycled one empty box, she’d notice and get angry. (She also didn’t do much work, which management knew, but for some reason wouldn’t do anything about, other than split up the department into individual sections so they could keep track of what she did do, hence why she had her own warehouse area.) We’ll call her “Jill”.

    One day, I discovered the source of a horrible smell was a dead mouse that had gotten stuck in a pile of scrap metal, and had enough. The department head also hated Jill’s mess, but never wanted to confront her on anything, so I asked management, who gave me permission to clean and blame them if Jill asked. So for several months, another coworker and I slowly chipped away at the worst of the hoard, always answering “oh, I don’t know, I think management moved that” if Jill said anything.

    And then! Jill didn’t come in for a week! We finally got confirmation from management that she was out for surgery for at least a few months. So we cleaned everything. No more boxes on the floor. No more boxes on the shelves with one single item in each. We were able to consolidate so many boxes that it completely eliminated the problem of a “too-small” warehouse! We left Jill one single shoebox sized box of her paper crap, to be nice, I guess.

    This warehouse had been universally dreaded *for years* during inventory. I had multiple people come up to me to thank me that year, because inventory went so much faster, and coworkers could now actually find things for customers.

    Jill came back after 6 months and had a fit, but she couldn’t really complain to management (after all, we did leave her one “important” box!) And it was now much, much easier to keep the warehouse clean, so any new mess was dealt with swiftly by everyone else.
    She finally got fired a year or two after I left (just not a great coworker all around.)

    1. EllenD*

      One job had a senior manager – not mine thank goodness – who had piles and piles of papers, including a a whole 6ft filing cupboard for her papers – everyone else had a pedestal or one drawer. She kept newspapers, magazines, articles that she was too busy to read now, but might contain important information related to her policy area. Problem was the papers went back years. When she eventually retired 90% was junked straight away and some poor soul had to check the rest to ensure anything that needed to be retained was filed in the electronic system and accessible.

    2. NothingIsLittle*

      Wow that sounds awful! I hoarded for many years and remember the crippling fear when someone moved something of mine without my knowledge, so I have a lot of empathy for Jill. But you can’t have that at work! It’s one thing to endanger yourself, it’s entirely another to endanger coworkers who might not have other options.

  54. Sunshine*

    Not my workplace, but as a college student in 2004, I found out the hard way that my department head refused to use email. He had an email address, you could send email to it… he would never see it. Theoretically the department admin checked it for him, but in practice I had a terrible time getting his signature, as his responsibilities also kept him away from his posted office hours.

    1. mreasy*

      I was in college from 1997-2001 and students had the option of asking for their campus email to be printed for them and routed to their mailboxes. We had barely any email communication for classes!

      1. NotBatman*

        In 2014, I went to my academic advisor and told her I wanted to add a major and needed her to email her approval. She left and brought back the department admin, then told the admin to turn on her computer and find the emails. The admin, apparently used to this routine, didn’t even blink an eye as the advisor prompted me to explain what was supposed to go in the email and then ordered the admin to send it. I got the impression that my advisor handled every part of her job that required email this way, and felt bad for the admin who surely had better things to do with her time.

    2. Mentally Spicy*

      I once visited an office in about 2009 where one of the managers had no computer in his office. His secretary (yes, he had a secretary) would print out every email he received and bring it to him to read. He would then dictate his response into a voice recorder. His secretary would take the voice recorder, type up his response and send the reply email.

      The thing is, he was about my age at the time. Maybe early to mid 30s. I don’t think it was a case of technophobia. I think he just wanted to feel like a big shot.

  55. Hotdog not dog*

    Back in the olden days, various notifications from the home ofice would automatically route to a continuous feed dot matrix printer in each branch where an employee was responsible for tearing them into sections and distributing the reports to whomever they needed to be directed. Great system in the 70s when the alternative was mailing to the relevant office location.
    Up until about 2018 or so, this printer would continue to rattle off reports which were duly retrieved and distributed only to be put into the bin without being read- because of course the intended recipients had already received a copy of their report electronically at least a day ago.
    We were nonetheless required to maintain the system because we had ONE executive who never read his email and insisted on keeping files full of old reports. He was finally forced to embrace change when the last printer the company owned broke down and couldn’t be repaired or replaced.
    The funniest part is that somewhere there is still a computer sending reports to printers that no longer exist, because the system that generates them is so old that nobody in IT can figure out how to stop it. At least nobody has to listen to a dot matrix rattling away all day long, though.

    3. Vio*

      I’m imagining future archaeologists digging into an ancient office room to find a somehow still active computer from thousands of years ago still sending out reports…

  56. procedure change stat!*

    My team includes people that are off site and cannot be on site and some off site people who float between teams. Before I came along information was shared (begrudgingly) via email. This information is important for our off site personnel to do their jobs. This was apparently how its always been done and no one questioned it. We have a program that is our industry standard has a digital area to share documentation. I saved all information digitally in an area where all offsite people had access. I didn’t ask I just did it. When asked I said oh old job did it that way. Sorry wasnt thinking. I managed to get the higher ups to approve it (after the fact) by pointing out we already paid for this program and if we used it more we could save money by getting rid of this other program and it would make our off site personnel work faster. It worked I sold the owner and one of the other higher ups on it and now its a required procedure for all teams. This has pissed off a few teams that preferred the old method but all off site personnel especially all of our floating personnel has thanked me.

  57. CarCarJabar*

    Government Agency, mid-2010s. Finance manager insisted on building financial reports by hand in excel. Pull up mainframe, hand enter numbers from mainframe into excel for each section, total each section into a department, total each department into the Agency. Calculate variances by hand… Finance Manager regularly worked (unpaid) overtime to get this report prepared every month (sometimes months late) and regularly complained about being overwhelmed and overworked, insisting no one else could prepare this report…. Until, on a slow day, I hopped down to IT and asked someone to build the exact report in our reporting software. Bing, bang, boom! Her entire workload was reduced to a few clicks. The most infuriating part was that NO ONE ELSE in the agency recognized how inefficient her process was, no one else helped find a solution. I was junior to her, new to the organization, and was the only person to recognize and fix the issue. Needless to say, the Finance Manager was ‘encouraged’ to take an early retirement, and I got the heck out of Dodge ASAP.

    1. The Dude Abides*

      Does your mainframe program also go by the name BlueZone?

      If so, we share a bond of pain and head-desking.

  59. Mefois*

    At my previous job, we used to have this really terrible home made instant messaging system. It was clunky, not user friendly, and most annoying, instead of a discreet notification, it popped up a large window in front of whatever you were working on. Everyone hated it except for the head of IT who created it. It finally got replaced with teams during covid when it became obvious that it wasn’t really effective for remote work. I was on my way out by then but I still celebrated the retirement of that awful system.

  60. NemoToday*

    Once worked for a company that required all company computers to run Internet Explorer 5 or earlier. Because the antique server that ran the quality software couldn’t run anything that would interface with anything newer and the software was so old that updating the server would have nuked decades of quality data. Eventually they did update everything, but I think that was after they hired competent IT Security staff…

  61. Dry Erase Aficionado*

    The software at my office had two different sides, one for serving customers and the other for billing and finances. My team, on the billing side, took over a process from another manager, on the customer facing side, that was directly related to billing. The customer team needed to know it was done, but the details beyond that were irrelevant to them and very important to my team. The team we were taking the process over from hated doing it, and were frequently behind on it.

    After doing the process for a few weeks and learning where the challenges were, my team began to make changes. Again, we were the only ones who used the information, everyone else just needed to know the box was checked, so to speak. I explained to the other manager that one of the changes was that rather than going into the customer side of the software to enter the information there, we would enter it in a different section of the billing piece and anyone who needed it, could view that section from within the customer area.

    The version I was proposing meant my team entered information one place they already were in anyway, and his team clicked a tab that was already on their screen, then the only button on that tab, and opened one window. The version I rejected meant my team had to open a different part of the software, wait for the customer to sync, open a form, open another form, enter the information (which was a nightmare of needing to go back and forth between the mouse and keyboard, so more annoying that it should be), save each form and exit, and his team had to open a form, open the second form, and scroll to the information.

    Other Manager had an absolute fit. It culminated with him stomping his foot and saying, “NO! you have to do it this (legacy) way, because that’s the way it has always been done and that works and that’s the way I want it!” I walked away, we never spoke of it again, and my team did it my way.

  62. Blarg*

    At the US Supreme Court, the most junior justice has several assigned tasks that have, apparently, just always been. For instance, when the justices meet in their weekly conference — no clerks, no assistants — it is the newest justice who has to open the door when someone knocks. Every time. The newest justice also has to represent the justices on the cafeteria committee.

    Justice Stephen Breyer was the junior justice for 12 years — from when he was appointed in 1994 until Alito was appointed in 2006. Elena Kagan did it for 7 years.

    Because, I guess, that’s just the way they’ve always done it. Wild to think that in 12 years, no one else thought, “huh, maybe someone other than Breyer should get up to get the door.”

    2. Pomegranates*

      I mean, giving new hires scut work happens basically everywhere, but imagine being “new” for 12 entire years because you’re on the supreme court and there are only 9 of you.

  63. hello*

    I currently work for a state office (joined in 2022), where they use Salesforce to keep track of several programs, grants, etc. For some reason, right up until the pandemic, the entire department seemingly kept just physical copies of documents, despite easy access to saving things digitally both in a common drive AND in Salesforce (and I have to imagine that’s why they started using it back in 2015?). Luckily that’s now changed.

  64. Anon_for_Now*

    I started at a tiny company with only one person in each role. Over the years the company grew and added more people to each area.

    We also saw a lot of change in how we processed work orders, both because of the volume increase and because this was when everything was turning digital.

    My job creating the product turned into 5 jobs. We added 3 client facing positions to take orders. A couple jobs were created to coordinate all of this.

    But the person who processed the orders & filed them in our increasingly out of date file system remained one lone job, even as her workload became increasingly unmanagable.

    It wasn’t that management wouldn’t hire anyone for the job. It’s just that no one could understand her convoluted filing system and she wouldn’t spend more than 15 minutes teaching them.

    So they’d work with her for a couple of months. She’d redo all of the work they tried to do. Not explain what was wrong with it. And eventually they’d quit or get reassigned somewhere else.

    Then the owner decided we had to make the leap. We had to go digital.
    But no digital ticketing system was ever going to be a match for how this woman worked and it was impossible to think of asking her to change how she filed.
    Any mention of it and she dissolved into tears.

    They looked into having one custom made, but that was too expensive and the developers didn’t really seem to understand her crazy system anyway. They hired thier OWN developers. Multiple times. To recreate her system in a digital form.
    We weren’t a software company. It was just that important to keep her and her system.
    Could. Not. Be. Done.

    20 years later, she’s got to be nearing retirement. But from what I hear, she’s still there doing the job the exact same way she always has. All by herself.

    1. NothingIsLittle*

      Part of me is desperate to meet this woman and learn her ways! I have a couple of super neurotic systems (nail polish by finish then color, but finish distinguishes multichrome from duochrome and there’s separate sections for flat glitter and textured glitter), but I’ve always been able to explain them.

  65. GoodNPlenty*

    I worked in a case management role with cases that could go on for years. Each person took cases from dedicated teams. When someone was out on leave the rest of us would cover that person’s desk. Coverage was required even if the person was out for 15 minutes.

    A decision was made when the company was founded that if a case came in when you were covering, *you kept it forever* even if you were covering for an hour. This ended up creating an environment where no one wanted to cover anyone ever because it wasn’t just desk coverage until the person came back. You’d end up with cases off team for years.

    No matter how often this was discussed it was viewed as sacred. It was as if divine beings had decreed this coverage plan.

  66. Clover*

    Just out of college, I worked as an admin for a county-level agency run by a board. All agency expenses, including paychecks, were issued in the form of physical checks that had to be signed by two board members. Only one board member regularly worked onsite; the others only showed up for board meetings.

    I didn’t own a car and definitely couldn’t buy one–I was part-time earning minimum wage–so I had to walk halfway across town and find the other board member who worked at the local university anytime I needed a check signed or, like, wanted to get paid. And they then made snarky comments about the amount of time I was unavailable because I was en route to or from getting checks signed.

    I pretty much hated everything about the job and put in my notice after a few months to work retail instead. Apparently they weren’t enamored of me, either, because when I gave notice they said, “how about we just have today be your last day?”

  67. jane's nemesis*

    I worked at an organization for about six years with a couple different supervisors. The call-off procedure with all of them was that I could email, call, or text that I was sick, whatever I preferred, and that was enough. Later when I was back from being sick, I could update the org’s payroll system that I had used sick time. (We were all salary.) It was great – I loved being able to text or email whenever I decided I was too sick to work, not have to cough cough cough my way through leaving a voicemail for someone to make sure I *sounded* sick enough.

    Then I transferred to a different, but related part of the organization. The payroll systems remained the same! and YET, the new call-off procedure was to email my supervisor that I was sick but also CALL a central number and report that I would be out sick, for someone to then email many people on many teams that I would be out. I then of course still had to go in and update the payroll system later that I had used sick time.

    That was annoying enough for a while, because I hated calling the central number and potentially having to speak to a live person (if they started early enough and I called late enough) to call off, plus the intrusive email going out reporting that I was out to a bunch of people who really didn’t need to know I was out.

    But then Covid hit. And the central number was given an extremely long introductory voicemail message explaining how our offices had gone remote due to the lockdown but that voicemails would be checked regularly and also what people should do if they were having a medical emergency (we were healthcare adjacent but NOT healthcare ourselves). I timed it once when I called off several months into covid and the time between dialing in and finally getting to leave my voicemail was FIVE MINUTES. And there was no way to skip the long message!

    A year later, the instructions on the voicemail explaining we were working from home due to the emerging covid-19 pandemic had never been updated and the voicemail was still five minutes long, no one was actually monitoring the box with regularity anymore and bothering to send out the emails announcing our absences, and I was ready to lose my mind every single time I had to call off, when some administrator FINALLY changed the procedure to bring us in line with what my old teams had done and eliminated the call to the central number.

    The last time I called the central number for an unrelated reason about two years into the pandemic, the intro message had still not been changed!

  68. Anonymous for this One*

    I worked with a client company you’ve definitely heard of in the transportation industry that required employees to use Internet Explorer as recently as 2021 and might still be doing so today.

  69. Catabodua*

    And, for those that have folks that are against getting rid of their paper … I have a funny one. Former employer, lots of long time employees who would NOT stop their paper processes, even though they were now required to do things digitally. So they wasted time, tracking / updating / whatever by doing everything twice.

    They also had an antiquated computer system where everything was stored on site in one server. This was over 30 years ago, at a company who was already behind the times, so it wasn’t a very complex set up.

    The cleaning folks unplugged the server to run a vacuum and didn’t plug it back in.

    The chaos the following morning when the digital records/computer stuff was not working and not available…. the paper people made multiple, snide comments about how they could keep working and it wasn’t a problem because they had kept up the CORRECT way to do it…

    When it was finally figured out (and plugging it back in took wayyyyy longer than you’d think it would), the company changed the lock on the door to the server and didn’t give the new one to the cleaning folks.

    They were never, ever, going to convince those paper folks to give up their paper after that.

    1. Bruce*

      I worked at a place where the printers were inside the server room. One night I was working late and went in to get a print out. There was a production worker sitting on a rolling stool as he pulled out a big stack of print-outs… when I came in the door he was so startled that he jumped up… and his legs pushed the stool out from under him, across the floor and BANG into the front of one of the server computers! I apologized for startling him, we both got our print-outs and left. The next morning that server was down with a bad disk. I talked to the IT manager and they agreed that the printers should be moved out of the server room and the door locked…

      1. Orv*

        A bank I worked for had a server down overnight because a janitor pushed a chair against it at just the right angle to hold the reset button down. After that they crafted a plastic guard for the reset button.

  70. Czech Mate*

    I work at a university. A few days before Thanksgiving every year, one of the higher ups in HR will email all faculty and staff announcing that the university will close at 3:00 pm the day before Thanksgiving in order to allow everyone to get ahead of the holiday traffic. They do this every year. They refuse to put the early closure on the HR calendar, and so everyone is expected to proceed in the expectation that we will be open until 5:00 pm until we hear otherwise from HR. They also refuse to announce the campus closure any earlier than a few days before Thanksgiving. This is especially odd considering they usually give plenty of advance notice when the campus needs to close early for, say, a football game. I guess we’re all supposed to be “surprised” when HR extends its beneficence by allowing us to leave two hours early, even though it’s already too late to update travel plans and none of the students are on campus, anyway.

    1. Kammy6707*

      Until you mentioned a football team, I thought you may have worked at one of my previous jobs! I worked at one university where it was hit or miss what the President would do each year – close at 3:00, close for the entire day, or not close at all! I just started putting in vacation time in advance rather than playing that game.

      Oh, and then instead of it being announced from the President’s Office, it started being left up to the individual divisions. Problem was, no one really liked my Dean and we worked in a very small building that only housed our school, so we were pretty cut-off. She also wasn’t the type to make any decisions on her own and wasn’t very nice. For example, she wouldn’t let our grad assistant leave early the day before Thanksgiving so that she could drive to Maine (we were in Maryland!). She then left for the day about 10 minutes later. Ridiculous.

      On the last day before Christmas break one year, I tried to take some documents over to the Registrar’s Office in our Administration Building. This was where HR, Admissions, President’s Office, Provost, etc. were all housed. The entire building was dark and all the doors closed! After relaying that, our Dean said we could leave. When we walked out, ours were the only cars in the parking lot!

      1. Czech Mate*

        I put in my holidays in advance too, BUTTTTTTTT the closure always affects the PTO. For example, if we close at 3 instead of 5, you’re only using 5 hours of PTO, as opposed to 7. But if you don’t request the full 7 hours in advance, it’s not clear if you’re taking the full day off or just a partial day. So you request the full 7 hours, but then the day itself ends up only having 5, so then those two extra hours of PTO…disappear into the ether?

    2. Cathie from Canada*

      Yeah I worked at a government office like that. On Christmas Eve the HR director would go around telling every floor how he was going to ask the Deputy Minister if we could leave at 3 – multiple updates for the next 2 hours about how the Deputy was busy but maybe he could be contacted between meetings, it went on and on, and we all sat at our desks doing nothing while we waited. As though no one could ever get this decided any earlier – what, they didn’t know Christmas was coming?
      I finally concluded it was the only day of the year that people cared about the HR director, so he milked it for all it was worth.

      1. Czech Mate*

        Hahaha I think that’s what’s going on, too. I’ve never met our HR director, but I’ve heard anecdotally that he has a martyr complex.

  71. CTA*

    At my current job, we’re not allowed to delete membership records/contacts when they are obsolete and this causes kaos. We can’t delete records because someone decided we needed to preserve the paper trail. Employees will just add “DO NOT USE” to the contact’s last name. This is ok if recordkeeping and membership sales were all manual. But it’s not. We have a website where people can buy/renew memberships and that site uses an API to interact with membership records. There’s no easy way to tell if a membership record is “obsolete.” The only way to tell is if the name has the words “do not use” in it, which isn’t the best. When this “do not use” system was decided on, no one thought about the website. I think they thought “magic” would happen and they didn’t understand that you need to tell your web developer about the outcomes you want. A few members started asking why their name has the words “do not use”. My employer decided to replace “do not use” with an underscore instead. As in “John Doe_” instead of “John Doe – DO NOT USE”. A little better, but it doesn’t fix the underlying kaos.

  72. Drowning*

    My current programming job consists almost entirely of processes like this.

    One example: various data sets need to be loaded into our software. Whenever there’s a new one, we have to make code changes to define the various options to go with it. Then it has to get deployed to one of our 50 instances for testing because we don’t have a real test environment. Then, once tested, we can make it part of a release and once released, our internal users can finally upload their new data.

    We have requests filed for new types of data set multiple times *per week*.

    A prototype for a more sane approach has existed since April. There is pressure from upper management to do something about the ridiculous amount work in our backlog caused by processes like this. The new approach will probably never be fully implemented, though, because:

    * Our product owners don’t want process-improvement stuff taking up room in the backlog that they could jam more features into
    * Implementing the solution requires the cooperation of an architect who does not see developers as his colleagues or peers and is not going to accept a solution suggested by one
    * A general fear of doing anything that lets our users have more control over getting their jobs done

    I’m working on my own fix for this, which is to find a new job.

  73. Chirpy*

    Also at a previous job, the entire company’s systems, including inventory for every location, ran on Windows 98….in 2015. They literally said having a system so old made it harder to hack.

    They finally changed over when some IT person finally made it clear to corporate that if the system ever crashed, it was completely unrecoverable.

  74. Web of Pies*

    General to many of my past jobs: People really don’t like it when you organize shared server files, even when they spend all day griping about how they can’t find anything on the pre-organized server.

    1. Orv*

      This reminds me that I had a coworker for a while who remembered where all her files were by how they were positioned on her desktop. It was completely covered with file icons that she kept track of with pure spatial memory. One day an OS update sorted her desktop by name and it was absolute chaos; she couldn’t find anything.

      1. anonymous anteater*

        My mom had such a colleague, utilizing files on the desktop. When they moved offices, that colleague was very anxious to be reassigned the same monitor, because all the files were on it.

    2. JustaTech*

      I had a coworker once helpfully re-organize our team’s shared folder (it was organized, she just wanted to change something).
      In doing so she broke all the hyperlinks in my Access database, and it took me an entire day to re-make all of them. When I told her what had happened and how long it had taken to fix and asked that she give the group a heads up before doing that next time she just sort of shrugged.

  75. Eliza*

    I worked for a publication that had a bread-bag-based content management system. They were these waxy paper bags designed to hold a loaf of bread, and each article for the issue had a bag with all of the relevant collateral. Anything you did for an article (research, drafts, fact checks, layouts), you had to print out your work and put it in the bag.

    They would get passed around the office, and as we got closer and closer to deadline, people’s desks would be piled high with bread bags. In order to properly review articles, you had to take all the contents out of the bag. Things typically got more frenzied closer to deadline, so by the time we closed out the issue, everyone’s fingers were typically COVERED in paper cuts.

    We’d keep the bags in storage buckets for three months after we went to press, just in case we needed to go back and check something, then we’d spend an absurd amount of time disassembling all of them so we could reuse the bags.

    This system was in practice until the year of our Lord 2020 when the pandemic FINALLY forced them to find a digital content management solution.

    1. jane's nemesis*

      of all the bananas systems in this comment section, I think this one wins. WHAT? Why bread bags???

      1. Dasein9 (he/him)*

        My Guess: Because in 1923, when the system was implemented, the bakery on the corner would give them the bags for cheap.

        1. Eliza*

          It was, hilariously, implemented in the early 2000s, but I do think at the time the pub still received a lot of physical collateral via mail, so it made sense to use bags to keep materials together. By the time I worked there, everything was received digitally and then printed out to go in the bags, so the need was completely obsolete.

          The bread bags themselves definitely had a banana-pants provenance, though. They were provided by the publisher/owner, who lived in a different country where I guess(???) these bags were commonly used in bakeries. He only came to visit every couple of years, so whenever he came, he would bring more bread bags with him to replace the ones that were beginning to disintegrate from heavy use.

          1. Hlao-roo*

            The story started out “???” and learning that the bread bag supply was variable and international adds brings it up to “??????” levels.

    3. iglwif*

      This is ABSOLUTELY AMAZINGLY BANANAS.

      And I used to work at a place where publications in process were stored as stacks of printouts in dedicated shelving units (kind of a pre-IKEA Kallax situation). Even those guys, I think, would be gobsmacked by the bread bags.

  76. Pretty as a Princess*

    There’s this phenomenon called “The Purpose of a System is What it Does” which is basically when the *outcomes* in use get misaligned with the original intent.

    When this collides with public policy, for example, the results can be horrible. Because then when people talk about replacing systems or updating policy – they are focused on what is *embodied in the use of the system* and not the actual objectives or outcomes.

    A not inconsequential aspect of the family separation crises at the US border in recent years was due in part to outdated behaviors of SYSTEMS and PRACTICES being encoded/confused with POLICY, and then POLICIES updated based on the SYSTEMS instead of the other way around.

  77. Indigo64*

    worked at a private university that was notoriously stingy and resistant to change. The course catalog was in a program created by a former IT director, in a computer language he wrote. He was the only person who could edit it, and even though he was retired, he’s still come in periodically and update it. There was no one else who could maintain it- heaven forbid something happened to him, we’d be registering students with pen and paper. We got a new dean who was horrified and immediately started researching alternatives. Once a committee selected a software, the transition took over 3 years. The new company sent a team to help with the transition and people dragged their feet “it’s too complicated, what if we get hacked? What’s wrong with the old system, we’ve used it just fine for 30 years!” I was gone by implantation day, but there was so much drama leading up to implantation and then… nothing. The new system worked! My peers went from spending a month on the course catalog to a couple of days. Students stopped calling at 7am registration day because the student portal actually worked.
    The best complaint I heard “I can’t believe we are putting John out of a job! He’s been so loyal to the university!” John had been retired for YEARS! I hope he went on a cruise or something to celebrate.

    1. NotBatman*

      Oh hey, do we secretly work for the same school?

      Well, I know we don’t, because we still have our 20+ year old system that works <50% of the time.

  78. Strive to Excel*

    Oh boy, where to even start. I’ll limit myself to two.

    1. OldJob audit client. Very large client being audited under full public standards – if you’re not familiar with the specifics, the relevant bit here is that companies with public stock have to go through an audit to not only make sure that their numbers are correct, but that the process they use to get there is correct. Massive PITA. Anyways, their accounting system wasn’t quite DOS-based but it was pretty close. There had been a number of significant accounting standard changes since their system had been implemented which their accounting system had not been updated for. This meant that instead of updating their accounting system, they had instead hired two or three CPAs to do their contract revenue calculations for them. It also meant that when we were doing our audit, we had to do so much more testing work because they were doing so much manually. They were “in the process” of switching to a more modern system when I started. By the time I left OldJob they still hadn’t made the switch… three years later.

    2. Current job, construction-adjacent, biggest inputs into our work are labor hours and materials. We’re trying to fully get the whole company onboard with a little industry-specific ERP, including doing estimates & tracking. Unfortunately, my boss struggles with the new ERP… so he’s still doing everything in our antiquated excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet hasn’t received good inventory cost & labor cost updates for two years, and is one of those finicky Excel monstrosities that breaks if you breath on it hard. This would be much more irritating if he wasn’t so good-natured about it, and he spends enough time in the field, talking with vendors & clients, and working with finance on a grand scale that he tends to also spot any huge errors.

  79. EttaPlace*

    Education is a hotbed of outdated and illogical practices! One district where I worked *still* insists on having 1.5 hour long mandatory meetings after school every. single. Wednesday. No matter that we all went digital 4 years ago and everyone has access to multiple video conferencing platforms. Never mind that most of the items in each meeting could have been an email or addressed to the small group they concerned. The first thing people from my old district rejoice about when quitting is no more Wednesday meeting!

  80. KayDeeAye*

    I’ve told this story before, but goodness knows it fits the parameters, so here we go again.

    Perhaps only graphic designers or those who work with them will appreciate the foolishness of this, but…

    We had a graphic designer who never converted to Quark and who flat-out refused to convert to InDesign as well. She used Corel, a program that younger AAM commenters have probably never heard of, for *everything*, and to be fair she could make it do a lot. But she was asking Corel to do all sorts of things that were above and beyond that software’s pay grad, and she kept this up for years.

    We finally hit the point where printing firms were literally refusing to work with Corel files any more, so she was going to have to learn InDesign. Instead, she quit and went to work for a guy who was the Corel King of the Midwest. I don’t know if she ever did learn InDesign (she suddenly died a few years ago).

    But one of the weird things was that after she left, we had somebody take a look at her computer and she had FIVE different versions of Corel on her hard drive. She apparently liked how version 2 did X and how version 4 did Y and so on, so she kept them all. No wonder she was always wanting more memory, and no wonder her PC always ran so slowly. If she’d gotten a sixth version, she was going to have to stick it in her pocket, ’cause it wasn’t going to fit on her hard drive, that’s for sure.

    Surely it would have been simpler to just learn InDesign? But her resistance was kind of impressive, in a Do-You-Own-Lots-of-Corel-Stock-or-Are-You-Just-a-Nut? sort of way.

    2. detaill-orieted*

      Hahaha! Former graphic designer here, I used to work at a film output place (yes, that long ago) and boy did those Corel jobs not want to run. (At a different former job, had a boss who loved Ready, Set, Go! At least he let me get modern software when I took over the design.)

  81. DoctorsWilliamandCharles*

    This is almost a reverse scenario, but a way of highlighting someone not doing it a better way.

    The Mayo Clinic assigns a patient number to people. That patient number follows that specific patient everywhere. Your medical records are tied to it. Billing tied to it. If you had a procedure 30 years ago in Rochester, they can pull up all the records of it tomorrow in Jacksonville. It works incredibly smoothly and it was designed in the 1920s I believe.

    Several years ago, I had some medical stuff and visited a local hospital (in a city of about 100,000 people). I received multiple invoices, all with different account numbers that were about 51 characters long. Trying to keep up with the account numbers was challenging, because I had to write separate checks to pay for each step in the process. Over the course of the time I was being treated, I ended up getting multiple checks from the hospital for overpayment. Also got several calls from the business office because certain accounts weren’t paid. I told them that perhaps following a more inclusive system like the one designed nearly 100 years ago would be helpful. It sure would have saved them time, and me a lot of stress.

    1. NotBatman*

      Ohhhh jeez you’re giving me flashbacks to when I was dealing with a complex medical issue and had exactly this brand of BS to deal with. Not only was I repeatedly overcharged, but I had the wrong medical information in my chart half the time, which — when going in for a major surgery — is terrifying to contemplate.

    2. NothingIsLittle*

      Currently dealing with this! Why is my ER bill coming from three different sources and why, for the love!, are you randomly adding new charges later because they’ve “just finished processing.”

  82. Bruce*

    In the mid 80s I started at a tech company that ran everything on memos and lotus-123. Every week we would update an action item list on lotus and turn in a floppy, these would then be consolidated into a single sheet for the whole company. Given the tech of the time, that part of it was kind of impressive, the CEO was very proud of it. But the crazy part is that everyone of these Action Items was supposed to be documented by a memo, which would be printed out and filed! In the early days, they enforced this strictly, sometimes I needed to look up a memo and I’d see hanging binders filled with one sentence memos that were simply “This week I did the layout for (name of circuit)”. There were rows of cabinets full of these hanging binders! By the time I started they were easing up on the strict Action Item -> Memo rule, and we were able to cut back to only writing memos for tasks that had a result that needed to be in a memo. But it was a few years before they recycled the rows and rows of cabinets full of hanging binders of trivial memos.

    1. Bruce*

      To be clear, this was before email or even widespread networking. Initially we were doing all this on shared Compaq dual floppy PCs, it was a year before I got my own PC and was able to upgrade it with a 20 MB hard drive card… All the consolidation was done by an admin manually swapping floppies into a PC…

  83. Not Your Mother*

    Back in the day, the site where I work belonged to a well-known but small company that manufactured household stuff in the early- to mid-20th century (think: stoves). When Big Multinational Defense Contractor acquired the site in the 1980s, many of the people who worked at the site just kept their old jobs and started working for BMDC, the only change being that the site was now building military stuff instead of household stuff.

    All of the admins from the Days of Yore kept their old processes, though. As an example, our coffee makers are still supplied by the same company that was supplying them 40 years ago. This is not a bad thing – we love being loyal customers! – but due to a number of reasons, that company has only ever communicated with and will only communicate with ONE admin on site. (We have a team of 25 admins running this place.) This isn’t a contract thing and there’s nothing stopping them from communicating with anyone else.

    According to the sacred ancient process, when one of us needs a new coffee maker, we have to send a pretty-please-may-I email to this admin, who then emails the company to request it, who then requests the old machine from the admin, who then lets the requestor know to send the old machine in, and then the admin sends it to the company, and then the company sends the new one to the admin, and then the admin sends it to the requestor. This process takes approximately two weeks from original request to final coffee maker installation, and people are really cranky in the meantime (because, you know, caffeine).

    Once I went absolutely ROGUE and ordered a coffee maker myself from one of our punch out catalogs. It took approximately two business days from original request to final installation. And now I lead a quiet revolution among the admins to encourage them to circumvent the old, crappy process.

  84. Anon in case my boss is literally the only one in the world*

    My boss likes to have dates as plaintext in spreadsheets. Our central tracking spreadsheet has all the dates as plaintext “10.16.2024” format. Want to filter entries by month and year? Too bad!

    1. Strive to Excel*

      I just had a trauma flashback to editing WAY THE HECK TOO MANY quickbooks-generated dates that got read as plaintext for no good reason. I’ve gotten far more proficient than any human should be at the LEN, LEFT, RIGHT, MID, and FIND functions.

  85. Medium Sized Manager*

    I work in a veterinary adjacent field, and a looot of the small practices still handwrite records and then fax them. The scribble are awful to read, but most of the older veterinarians are resistant to switching to an electronic system. My favorite is asking them what the records actually say and they have no idea -___-

  86. KayDeeAye*

    I have told this story before, but it definitely fits the parameters, so here we go again.
    Perhaps only graphic designers or those who work with them will appreciate the foolishness of this, but we had a graphic designer who flat-out refused to convert to InDesign. (She never had converted to Quark, either.) She used Corel, a program that younger AAM commenters have probably never heard of, for *everything*, and to be fair she could make it do a lot. But she was asking Corel to do all sorts of things that were above and beyond that software’s pay grad, and she kept this up for years.

    We finally hit the point where printing firms were literally refusing to work with Corel files any more, so she was going to have to learn InDesign. Instead, she quit and went to work for a guy who was the Corel King of the Midwest. I don’t know if she ever did learn InDesign (she suddenly died a few years ago).

    But one of the weird things was that after she left, we had somebody take a look at her computer and she had FIVE different versions of Corel on her hard drive. She apparently liked how version 2 did X and how version 4 did Y and so on, so she kept them all. No wonder she was always wanting more memory, and no wonder her PC always ran so slowly. If she’d gotten a sixth version, she was going to have to stick it in her pocket, ’cause it wasn’t going to fit on her hard drive, that’s for sure.

    Surely it would have been simpler to just learn InDesign? Her resistance was kind of impressive, in a Do-You-Own-Lots-of-Corel-Stock-or-Are-You-Just-a-Nut? sort of way.

  87. Database Developer Dude*

    I developed a system in Microsoft Access that takes three reports as input, and outputs a new, formatted report in the format needed, turning a four-hour task into a ten minute task. My Army Reserve boss wants me to rewrite t, but when asked “in what, and why?” the answer is “I don’t know”

  88. Nuke*

    This was years ago, but not so long ago that this should’ve happened. I started working at a retail eye doctors’ office that had physical files. We also had a computer system, but the exams and whatnot were still on paper in files.

    The file room was organized by the first 2 letters of the last name, but within those sections, nothing was alphabetized. So all the “Mc” names were just…. 400+ files you’d have to go through every time to find the McMillan you were looking for.

    I was told, “don’t bother organizing it. We’re going completely digital soon.” I would try to clean out files because the shelves were also OUT OF ROOM due to how many files from 10+ years prior were in there, and papers inside the files themselves that needed to go.

    I worked there for almost 3 years and we never got the digital overhaul we were promised. A few months before I left, I started a project where I actually cleaned out and re-alphabetized the entire file room, with manager approval of course. My coworkers complained that I was “getting to do nothing in the file room”, but only a week in, they changed their tune when a file could be found in less than ten minutes of searching (while the patient was in the building!).

    So I guess it was technically untouchable, but I didn’t listen and fixed it myself. I got through the whole thing before I left. They did eventually switch to digital only, and I bet my work made it a lot simpler. You’re welcome!

    1. EllenD*

      I joined a team [30 years ago], where a massive backlog of paper filing had built up and was stored in a 6ft cupboard. Papers were randomly stored. As I was filing a new post there wasn’t a lot of work initially, so I began to add file number, even though there was no point in immediately filing, as this had to be done in date order and you’d just need to take the papers out. As I worked through each pile I sorted them by the file number I’d added. One of my new colleagues thought I was wasting my time, until she realised that she could quickly sort through the piles and find the papers she wanted. The rest of the team began this, and then we could file the papers – someone came in a temp support to do this. A problem for six to twelve months was resolved in a month or so. It did help me become familiar with the papers and filing system.

  89. Will "scifantasy" Frank*

    I have two.

    One is the law firm I was at from 2011-2016 (when I jumped in-house), which had several partners who used analog voice recorders–and called them Dictaphones, especially ironic as we were an IP boutique. Yes, they would dictate letters/memos on the devices, and leave the cassettes on their legal secretaries/assistants’ desks for them to draft and return in the morning, with the cassette, for signature.

    They actually moved to digital while I was there, but still used the devices in the same way. One partner who lateraled to another firm told me he got dazed stares when he asked his new firm about getting a Dictaphone…

    Again, 2011-2016.

    The other is from my coding days, and I warn you that this is going to be kind of jargon-heavy but every coder in the comments will be shuddering in disgust.

    When I was at a financial services firm, one of my primary responsibilities was to monitor amd update the “dealCVS” system. This was a complex scheme of custom commit hooks layered over a CVS version checkout/checkin system. The “analysts” (mostly pre-MBA types) would check out a tranche (a file, usually mostly text containing a bunch of numbers, which represented the relevant financial information for a specific time period in a largel financial transaction/deal), update the numbers, and run a script to check the file back in, at which point the custom hooks would run to verify that the data was correct before saving the deal back into the version control system. That way the repository contained verified data–the company’s primary service was a web-based system for analysis and review of such deals, including historical data.

    My job was to make sure the verification was running correctly and that a deal would only proceed to the actual checkin if it passed.

    I’ll give you a moment to recover, and then I’ll add that I worked there from 2006-2008, and the company’s clients, for whom it provided this analytical system, were all banks mostly doing mortgage- and asset-backed securities investments.

    By late 2007, there was a certain amount of consternation over the fact that a whole bunch of clients weren’t issuing tranches anymore. And then in 2008, after I left to go to law school, the world found out why.

  90. DameB*

    Oh lordy. Back when the internet was still a newfangled fad and Pets.com was going to make money forever, I started a job at a national renowned publication, we used a word processing software called XYWrite.

    I was the youngest person by decades and had to learn to use a command line, like it was elementary school again (yes I learned command line programming in elementary school, I’m old).

    The software was written before we agreed on a standard, so you didn’t save a file, you typed “ST” to store it, you didn’t print a file, you typed “TY” to type it. The elder writers and editors threw a fit when we finally moved to windows and a GUI interface. They needed full day classes on how to use a mouse.

    I moved from that publication to *another* nationally renowned one and discovered that the whole paper was run on a software written by a company that went out of business in the 70s! They’d hired as many engineers as they could but it was the late 90s at that point and they were starting to retire. They finally modernized while I was there, and that’s a horror story for another time.

    2. iglwif*

      Hey, I remember XYWrite!

      (I also remember how annoyed my mom was when she got her first Windows computer. The mouse was bad, she felt, but the worst thing was “all those little f&&&ing pictures” — that is, the icons of the GUI. Fortunately she got over that pretty quickly.)

  91. Czhorat*

    In the AV industry every firm has their version of The Spreadsheet that they use to estimate costs and track equipment requirements for AV systems. One company (now defunct) had the MOST DETAILED one I’d ever seen. You had to account for literally how many feet of wire you’d use. For how many rack screws to mount equipment. How many connectors. This is HIGHLY unusual; most sane firms just give a number for “miscellaneous parts” because nobody counts things like screws.

    After a way too long intro on this I said “wow – so our cost estimates must be really accurate” and the manager shrugged and said “nah. Not really”. I then learned that everyone pretty much just *guessed* at most of the quantities. Wiring something in a room? Always 100 feet of wire. In a rack? 10 feet. So we had this super detailed plan to capture our SWAGs

    The problem is that The Spreadsheet was, like many things here, sacred. It’s how we tracked things. How we estimated labour hours. How we decided if a project was financially successful. So we would keep guessing and feeding junk into the spreadsheet and then *manually fixing the numbers* when they were too high. In an otherwise well-run company it was a weird outlier.

    To the best of my knowledge they kept using it until someone else bought them.

  92. I'll have the blue plate special, please.*

    My second employer used a homegrown system implemented by the then CIO. He had two system managers that would always be making updates and saving them but they had to fix the same errors and make changes over and over again. It turned the CIO made changes as well but when he did it he overrided his team’s work and everything would be completely lost. Sadly, the blame was put on one of the IT employees and he was let go. It wasn’t his fault. Eventually, the company realized what was going on and decided to get a better system like Drupal.

  93. Donatella Moss*

    Oh boy. Big city government agency. Everyone had to fill out time sheets. The CEO, the COO, the assistants, exempt, nonexempt, it didn’t matter. They were about the size of two 11 x 17 sheets put together. There was a top sheet and carbon paper and then two bottom copies. There were two columns listing the days of the week and you had to account for every hour and every minute. You could put in X if your in and out times were 9:00 am and 5:00 pm, respectively. And you had to code your time with this insane legend of categories that were printed on the bottom. Once filled out, you signed it, your supervisor signed it (and kept a copy), and then it got sent to HR.

    My first supervisor when I got there, I was exempt and worked 9-5. If I was a minute late, I needed to log that on my timesheet and then also log a minute over my time to “make up for it.” So my timesheet would read like this:

    Time In Time Out Code
    9:00 am 9:01 am xx (for unexcused absence)
    9:01 am 5:00 pm (no code needed for actual working)
    5:00 pm 5:01 pm yy (time make up)

    I left in 2018 and this was still the norm

    1. NotBatman*

      Oh my word. Did anyone bother to clock how many minutes and seconds were being spent on filling out time sheets?

      2. Martin Blackwood*

        what about the cost of those carbon paper forms? even buying in bulk….regular bond is still cheaper

    2. New Jack Karyn*

      The real Donatella Moss worked for the federal government, not a ‘big city government agency’. Unless that’s your cover?

  94. OMG for real???*

    At my old government job we couldn’t get comp time for conferences that were on weekends and holidays. I was scheduled to go to a conference over veterans day one year and was asking about 1.5X comp time because it was a holiday, and was told that actually, the opposite was true — because it was a holiday no comp time would be given.

  95. (anonymous for this one only)*

    At my job, one of the teams I work with screens people for possible funding. They do a good job once they’re planning to make a deal. But the process for getting people to them is a mess.

    Theoretically anyone can apply, but not everyone is qualified, not just financially but also, for projects this large (very large), they’re not going to make a deal if you don’t demonstrate you are very skilled. Fair enough. We also are working with underrepresented groups who often don’t have the MBA, even if they’re really impressive otherwise.

    For the last two years I’ve done a really good job trying to help possible participants get more education by building up our training side. I’ve done a good enough job that they let me hire a #2. Now that my little team has grown from 1 to 2, I’m trying to help them develop a screening tool that will funnel people effectively. Basically, before you randomly try to pitch to them, I’m working on a lil questionnaire that will determine if you have all your ducks in a row (because pitching and being denied is no fun for anyone – we WANT to fund as it’s what our nonprofit depends on). You take the questionnaire, and presumably it would help determine if you need additional training (which we are building more and more courses for), if you need individual coaching, or, sure, go ahead and pitch.

    But the funding team refuses to move away from their current process, which is basically: seek referrals, let the person pitch, ruminate for a while, send the person to individual coaching even if what they really need is to take a class (eg they don’t know how to use excel), let them be individually coached for sometimes a year or more, and then maybe not even fund them after all that.

    Some of them insist their process works and that they don’t need an additional tool. (Some of them, thankfully, are on board.) That’s all well and good, but then they constantly talk about how busy they are… when the reason they’re so busy is they’re sifting through tons of possible deals they are unlikely to ever actually do!

    So, my boss has said we have to tread very lightly but to continue moving forward and hopefully if adopted by enough the others will follow suit.

    Ultimately it’s basically “subject matter expert thinking they know more than educators” stuff, which is a lot of my job. I do love my job otherwise though.

  96. Strive to Excel*

    I lied, I have another one from when I worked in auditing. This happened in 2022.

    My dad works in actuarial science. Actuarial science overlaps with accounting in two common ways: health insurance calculations (the actuaries tell a company how much they should have in order to pay for expected claims) and pensions (about the same thing). It’s a relatively niche field, and there’s not a lot of companies that do it. This means that I would often end up reviewing files from my dad’s old company – some ten years after he left.

    I was reviewing some company’s healthcare actuarial calculations in the form of the biggest most complex Excel workbook you will *ever* see, and I found a page of process documentation. And what do I find? A set of instructions. Signed with my dad’s name. Dated to 2002.

      1. Strive to Excel*

        I’ll do you one better. I came home and told him about it. He laughed like a loon and said that sheet was already old when he started working on it. He’s pretty sure it dates back to the 90s.

  97. You want stories, I got stories*

    It was me, I did it.

    When I first started my new job, I was asked to build a query using SQL. I had 3 weeks of training on SQL. The query took 30 minutes to run. This query was run on a monthly basis. I made a note that this query took 30 minutes to run, and perhaps needed to be evaluated to run faster. I never ran the job again, it was given to a different team.

    10 years later, due to holidays, my team was asked to run the job again for one month. There was my note with the query and the job still took 30 minutes to run. I opened a support ticket to have the query looked at, (by the same team that ran the job.) They corrected the query after a few hours and now the query runs in 2 minutes.

    But it took me prompting them to correct the query before they would correct the query.

    1. Captain dddd-cccc-ddWdd*

      I work with similar stuff. The time spent to update, test, deploy etc can take quite a long payback time if it is only 30 minutes every month (especially since it could probably be scheduled or left running so didn’t actually need someone to sit and supervise it for the full 30 mins). If “a few hours” is 6 hours, that’s a 12-month payback time.

    2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      30 minutes once a month? Who cares, the computer’s time is cheaper than mine. Premature or otherwise unnecessary optimization wastes far too much time.

  98. Alex*

    Oh man, my old job was MOSTLY THIS.

    One of the most infuriating ones actually cost us thousands of dollars per year. Our manager INSISTED that we get something overnighted to us regularly. This was, theoretically, to check for errors in it before it went out to the public. Sounds great and reasonable, right? Well, there were three problems with this.

    First, no one ever checked them before they went out to the public. These packages would be overnighted to us, at great cost (they were heavy), and then sit on my colleagues’ desks, unopened. This was including my manager! Checking them was a boring task and people put it off.

    Second, these were actually *already* checked by the people who sent them to us. They were supposed to be representative of the lot that was going out to the public, but they were specifically selected because they were error-free (and perhaps there were errors in others). So, what was the point of checking them anyway (hence, perhaps, the behavior in item #1).

    And third, in the decade+ that I had worked there, we had never, not once, stopped the public release of these items at this point. To do so was hugely costly, and practically no error found was ever egregious enough to stop the process. So even if we DID check them and DID find an error, chances are, we wouldn’t do anything about it anyway.

    I calculated once that we spent 8k a year on this useless exercise.

  99. Speak*

    I work for a multinational privately owned company with many branches. I work for the US division of Company A under the umbrella of Main Company. We are using SAP for our ERP system and have been for around 10 years now so those of us who have been here a while know what we need to do to make it work. The issue with it is that we are using the same modules as everyone else under the Main Company. Our Company is not the same as any of the other companies who mostly make variations on their brand machine, we make custom machines and everyone is unique (even if they are a repeat). So we are missing modules in SAP to make it a good fit for us & we can’t get them because it is a global system that we have to shoehorn our methodology into what we have available. A recent hire coworker who had experience with SAP has asked where a module is so that they can look up some specific information, only to be told we don’t have that & they were shocked because that is a standard module and would specifically need to be removed from the standard SAP offering and it would have made many people’s jobs easier if it was running.

  100. Edwina*

    Just from quickly scrolling through the comments, I know I’m going to enjoy reading them! I’m in IT, and we just (finally!) hired a director of IT security, and he is really getting going on making our systems much more secure! I’m all about continuous improvement, but I’ve realized that there are times when I’m even feeling uncomfortable with all of the change. I know it’s for the better, so I’m on board, but I understand how people get attached to things.

    I was a technical trainer in my last career, and you have not lived until you’ve TRIED to teach law offices to use Word. They are correct – WordPerfect WAS better for a lot of things, esp. legal docs, but I cannot undo the decision made by the firm’s management.

  101. Kaitlyn*

    I worked for a housing developer, which is a field that cherishes its paper copies. One of my managers was INTENSELY strict about the way large documents were to be stapled: upper left corner, diagonal ONLY. Any deviation from this would result in a top-volume dressing down of the hapless staplee. She apparently had to move SO FAST in her work that the wrong staples would slow her down, but the constant policing of the staples was not seen as a time suck.

    I eventually created a comic zine about the staple issue, used their photocopier to make copies for friends, and then quit.

    1. Torvil and Dean*

      I once got shamed for using a diagonal upper left corner staple instead of a horizontal one – I wish we could’ve introduced these two staple monsters to each other to battle out which was the correct way!

  102. Wisdom Weaver*

    When I joined an excellent NYC nonprofit in the early 1980s, many of the documents concerning our cognitively disabled adult clients were HAND WRITTEN! It was explained to me that, at least up until very, very recently, it was a requirement that these documents be written out by hand…even though the typewriter had been invented in 1872 (literally more than a century before!) Fortunately, I was allowed to type out my own reports – on a manual typewriter that I brought to the office myself because there was NO TYPEWRITER OF ANY KIND in that branch of our agency.

    This was before the era of ubiquitous computers and printers, but still…!

    1. Cathie from Canada*

      I expect this was because “clerical workers type” while “professional workers write”. It used to be a status thing.

    1. Sunbeam+Nap=winning*

      we don’t talk about what’s running the Illinois Health and Family Services systems… **shudder**

  104. Panicked*

    I worked for a child welfare agency about 10 years ago and they *finally* transitioned their case record system to a new platform. We were dealing with the legal system, so proper, accurate, complete records were a must. The agency did zero research on what was actually needed, so they just accepted the lowest bidder. Readers, they implemented a medical records system and didn’t modify it at all to fit our needs. The system would error if you didn’t fill out everything, but most of it didn’t apply to us at all. We’d have to put a “.” in for vitals, like BP, pulse, and temperature. We’d file judicial rulings under “past medical records.” We couldn’t move forward without assigning a proper medical code to it (there wasn’t one, so everything was under some misc. code).

    We spent hours in training, not in how to use the system, but how to bypass the errors, what files to put where, and all sorts of other backwards stuff. It was absolutely infuriating.

  105. NMitford*

    Forget WordPerfect. I worked at one place where one very veteran secretary was allowed to continue using VolksWriter (google it) for years after other software programs had supplanted it.

  106. a clockwork lemon*

    We replaced LotusNotes (yes, the one that went away sometime in the mid-2000s) last year with a brand new system that somehow looks just as bad as LotusNotes but with 100% less functionality.

    Everyone hates the new system, because it doesn’t work, and the people who are responsible for managing it basically treat it like some sort of sentient eldritch horror. “The Tool won’t let you do that. The Tool isn’t smart enough to do that. The Tool will lock you out if you try to make that particular type of edit without a blood sacrifice under the second waxing gibbous moon after the vernal equinox.”

    They keep telling us that The Tool will be replaced at some point, but I’ve been with my company for three years, literally transferred departments in an attempt to escape the clutches of The Tool, and still somehow end up spending 30-40 hours a month manually updating excel spreadsheets in order to feed and pacify The Tool.

    Multiple people in different departments/divisions, including people employed by the vendor who built The Tool, have quit after less than two years because of The Tool, because the back end data mappings in the Tool are a madness rune.

    2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

      If you haven’t read Charles Stross’s Laundry Files, you need to. The premise of the first book (they change a lot over time) is more or less exactly software as eldritch horror. One minor character’s soul gets eaten by a PowerPoint.

  107. Ghostwriting is Real Writing*

    Way, way back in the day, I worked for a small family-owned publishing company. Computers were just becoming mainstream (no wifi – all of our desktop computers were attached to the main server via individual cables inserted in wall outlets). The server was shakey and would often go down. Only one person in the company knew what to do. When the server crashed, you had to call Jim. If Jim was in the office, that was fine. If Jim was busy or traveling, the entire company ground to a halt. For some reason, no one questioned this process. The server was mysterious, and Jim knew what to do. Then, one day, we hired a new editor who obviously thought we were nuts. She followed Jim into the server room to try and begin to learn the mysteries of the server so that maybe, given enough time, she could fix it if needed. Turns out that all Jim was doing was disconnecting the power cord, counting to 30, and plugging it back in. Jim was called a lot less after that.

  108. The Ticker Tape*

    I started at an ~3,000 employee company in 2022. I was reviewing some invoices for payment and the figures didn’t make sense so I asked one of my team in a different office to send me the backup validating the information. I was expecting an email with an excel file. No – they couriered me a hard copy package with ticker tape attached. Turns out the old manager like to review hard copy and wanted ticker tape to prove out any calculations. It took me 6 months to convince everyone that the world would not end and people would get paid if we used excel and formulas.

    1. London Calling*

      In 2004 I had an icily polite standoff with a manager who insisted that cheques for staff expenses were a lot less time consuming and trouble than electronic transfers (AKA ‘we’ve always done it that way.’) I literally made a list of pros and cons of both ways and how much time each took and presented it in a meeting (with the backup of the FD who’d been brought in to drag the place – ironically, a bank – into the 21c century).

    2. JustaTech*

      I had a quality department tell me that I could not use Excel to calculate a standard deviation for a form, I *had* to use a calculator.
      A calculator that only one person knew how to use, that would only show one set of numbers at a time (so if you’d typed in the first set wrong you’d never know). Did I mention that this calculation was most often done at 3am?

      As I was not actually under the auspices of the quality department I just used Excel and then would ask my coworker to re-run the calculations with the calculator in the morning.

      (You can validate a spreadsheet! And lock it down! Grrr.)

  109. El*

    I visited a laboratory in 2012 or so whose operations were all running on a Commodore 64. (My mother was ecstatic, she learned to program on one in the 1980s). It hadn’t been shut off in a decade because they were afraid it wouldn’t turn back on again, and where on earth were you going to get replacement parts?

    (I’ve since heard it has been replaced).

    1. NotBatman*

      I just sent this comment to my partner whose lab runs on a Tobii software from 2005, with the comment “See? Yours isn’t so bad!”

    2. JustaTech*

      Weirdly there’s a very active Commodore 64 enthusiast community, and people actively making new chipsets that are compatible.

      I love people’s hobbies.

  110. GiantPanda*

    I was a customer, not an employee, but:
    A furniture retailer in town writes things by hand. Orders, delivery notes, receipts. Multiple copies with carbon copy paper. Purchases are added up using a pocket calculator at the checkout, the sum is then written by hand. I don’t remember if they even had a proper register.

    The first time I bought things there was in 1997, most recently in about 2020. The shop has moved, but not changed procedures.

    1. Put the Blame on Edamame*

      My local greengrocer does this! it’s part of the charm having everything manually totted up on brown paper (they take debit card though)

  112. Jane*

    I worked for a psychiatric clinic where the second floor (where all of our offices were) was divided into two sections that were connected by an outdoor hallway with just an awning covering it. The doctor who ran the clinic was obstinately old-school, so as a result, there were boxes upon boxes upon boxes of files everywhere, dating back to the 1980s, many of which were stored in the outdoor hallway. The musty-basement smell whenever it rained was just unbearable.

  113. TP*

    I work at a small university that had a marquee style sign by one of its parking lots, to advertise upcoming events, etc. The software that ran it would only work on one computer kept in the basement, and constantly crashed and stopped working. It was everyone’s least favorite task to update the messaging.
    And I say “had” because a large vehicle ran into the sign and destroyed it and it was never replaced (this was 10 years ago). No one in my office shed a tear.

  114. NotBatman*

    My college’s database was created in Fall 2008. How do I know this? Well, when you log on, everything from the class schedule to the student handbook to the faculty pages is set to Fall 2008 by default. You have to click into a menu, open a side-bar, and scroll aaaalllll the way down to the current term to see what the school looks like now. But if you hit the “Back” or “Refresh” buttons, the page will crash and then revert back to Fall 2008.

    1. Kimmy Schmidt*

      Ha, my university has the same, only it goes back to NINETEEN TWENTY-FIVE. I have no idea why anyone put in all the years prior to an online system.

  115. Caz*

    We had the stamp book.
    As in, postage stamps.
    Now, I’m in favour of keeping a written record of how much postage was being used, what the costs were, when we needed to order more – that all absolutely made sense. But this was literally a hand-written book. In roughly 2015. I managed to persuade my manager and the whole department (spread across about a dozen sites with individual books) to switch over to spreadsheets by building a spreadsheet and showing how much easier and faster it was to record everything in there. Automatic calculation! No manual errors that need to be crossed out and re-written! NO MORE WHITE-OUT!!!

      1. Caz*

        It may still be there. God forbid that they should actually throw something out just because it was beyond useless. That would be *wasteful*. (clutch pearls here)

  116. HiddenT*

    I’m dealing with one at my current job. I’m a project manager and we don’t have a management system. Literally everything is done through email, we have to create a folder in our Outlook for every new project, we have to reply “received” to every email from our manager and the sales team, we have to manually edit email templates for client confirmations and vendor assignments, we have to put an appointment on our Outlook calendar for the due date so our manager knows how many projects we currently have. We have to manually enter the cost and vendor prices into QuickBooks, and email the Accounting team to let them know to charge a client’s card, and send an email to our manager to say the project’s been delivered so it can be closed. It’s hours of work that could be done in minutes with the right system (I speak from experience because I had a previous job in this industry that used a management system).

    The worst part is, they literally bought a management system last year and won’t let us use it. Both the people who run the company are on the sales team and have been at the company since the 80s, and they see no issue with the current system, but one of them got it into their head that they could buy this new system as a way to market to our clients that they could watch the progress of their projects, which literally no client wants. Our projects are short-term, usually a matter of days or weeks, rarely a month, so clients just want the finished product on time, that’s it. So four of us on my team (including myself) got trained in this new system last year, then it “launched”, and now it’s just sitting there, completely unused. I’ve tried multiple times to convince my manager and the people in charge that we’re already paying for this resource, we need to use it, but since no clients have shown interest in it, it’s just sitting there.

    I’ve given up at this point. Trying to find a new job that makes me less insane.

  117. Hey Ms!*

    In my current job, box office sales for high school programs are not kept track by a CRM or even an excel spreadsheet. Oh no. They are kept track of with a complicated system of the sales person’s forms, a separate cash/ticket exchange by a 3rd party, and a dry erase board. The way to keep track of the running total of sales is to go count how many tickets are remaining, count how much money is in the drawer, and compare that to the whole numbers written on the board.

    There are so many potentials for failures all around: miscounting of money, mishandling of tickets, or the dry erase board just getting erased or edited by anyone with a black dry erase marker. There’s no way of knowing if money was stolen, if a comp was given, or if someone just inflated their numbers.

    I have tried to get the appropriate people to use a spreadsheet so we can just glance and see important numbers, rather than recounting everything every day, but I have been unsuccessful. It’s The Way The Previous Person Did It, so it’s fine. Oh, and this is happening today in 2024, in our online and remote working/learning world, not in 2004 or even 2014 when digital vs. paper was more of a conversation.

  118. RedinSC*

    I work for local government. Any Personnel documentation must be completed on those 3-ply carbon forms and have an actual wet signature.

    Everyone in my office who was authorized to sign was out of state, and personnel wouldn’t allow me to have them docusign it, because it needed to be a wet signature. I even told them I’d print 3 copies on the yellow pink and white paper, But NO! WET SIGNATURE

    1. a clockwork lemon*

      I have no idea if this is true or even still the case, but there is a persistent rumor in the Chicagoland legal community that there’s a carbon paper factory somewhere in the country that is kept in business pretty much exclusively by the Cook County court system, where orders are still written out by hand on the old school 3-ply forms.

      It still gives me mild anxiety remembering how impossible it was to read the orders after they’d been scanned into a case management system. Sometimes it would be like a whole forensic analysis of a case just to figure out the date of the next status hearing.

      1. RedinSC*

        HA! I can believe this! AND probably my offices help keep that business afloat, even though we’re in CA!

      1. RedinSC*

        One would think that would have happened, right? BUT my department, specifically is considered paperless, except for the Personnel stuff that comes from that department! It’s INSANE

        1. Orv*

          In my experience the signature issue is all about what you can get your legal department to accept. Part of the reason it took us until COVID was because the legal department had insisted on wet signatures as the only thing that would hold up in court; it took a pandemic to force them to look at newer legal precedents.

          1. RedinSC*

            I know! The Docusign is accepted in every other department here in the county. AND our County Council are all ok with this. in this case it is apparently the head of Personnel, who personally does not like docusign, so she will not allow that to happen. I could have actually pushed this one up the food chain to the legal team, but just waited the week to have people come back because it would have taken longer than that to get an actual answer all while getting billed for the County Council’s time.

  119. River*

    We have someone that’s worked for our company for a few decades. They’re very tech savvy however they are the only one that uses a specific software to do their job. It’s the only way they can prove that they’re “better” than the rest of the department. The company wanted them to use newer software that some of these similar companies use but this person was able to somehow convince the higher ups that the software was actually not that great. Maybe they were right, maybe they weren’t, I don’t know much about that detail. One other person in the department does use the new software and has been for years.

    I do know that once they leave, whoever takes the position, is going to be required to use the new software. So in a way this person is a little bit of a silo/funnel. I don’t understand why the company is looking the other way and allowing them to do things the old fashioned way which is also inefficient. I guess it’s job security and the company is doing them a favor and sort of burying this under the rug. Their process of doing things actually slows things down a bit. They have fought and argued to keep doing the things the way that makes sense to them, but again, its not the smoothest of transactions. I think the fact they’ve worked for the company for a long time is what’s keeping this employee around. I know they don’t want to let this person go. Fortunately I don’t work in that department, but I speak to the manager of that department and they have to deal with this.

  120. They Call Me Patricia*

    I work in law. My old firm had 40-ish attorneys spread across 8 courtrooms. Each courtroom has a daily calendar of all cases to be heard in that department. Rather that use any kind of digital record-keeping about what happened in court, this was the required procedure:

    – Every attorney prints out a paper calendar for their department each day.
    – Every attorney hand writes notes for their own cases on their copy of the calendar.
    – Paper calendars get turned in to the office manager at the end of the day.
    – The office manager prints clean copies of the 8 department calendars, then proceeds to cut up the 40+ individual calendars handed in by the lawyers, and paste their notes onto the corresponding spot on her clean copy of the calendars.
    – These frankensteined calendars then get stored in boxes forever.

    It was literal cut and paste, with scissors and glue, every day, for almost 50 years. This practice only stopped when the office manager retired.

    1. RedinSC*

      We’re right up there with you until the cutting and pasting part of things. Our attorneys turn their calendars in to their legal secretaries who then have to enter everything into the Case Management System.

  121. Gericht*

    Way way back when, as I started as a PhD in the late 90’s there was an interesting computer chain.
    *important machine* ran on a very old computer 1 that still took 8 inch floppy disks and produced the important numbers on those.
    These then had to be converted to 5 1/4 floppies at computer 2, which were loaded onto computer 3 to 3.5 floppies and converted to a lotus 123 format. This was then brought to computer 4 that actually had internet access where it was converted in excel format and mailed to the person that had run the test.

    Paying the company that made the machine to just alter the interface to directly work with a then modern computer was considered ‘too much hassle’

  122. Anon Again... Naturally*

    When I was just out of college in the late 90s, I worked in an endocrinology services lab that performed specialized hormonal level tests for reproductive research. For some tests (elephant testosterone) it was the only lab in the world that offered them at the time.

    Our test equipment was run off of TRS-80 computers. For those of you not familiar with this computer, it was put out by Tandy via Radio Shack from 1979 to 1983 or so. At the time, computer fans referred to it as the ‘Trash-80’ for its combination of high cost and low quality. But the lab had developed their unique tests on that computer, and so we kept using them. The lab head scoured garage sales to find working models and we had a whole storage closet full for when the machines inevitably failed.

    There were other reasons that job was full of bees, and it convinced me that Professional Science was not for me. I still drive by the lab regularly and always wonder if they are still using them.

      1. Peanut Hamper*

        I would if I could. I learned to code on a TRS-80, using TRS-DOS adn TRS-Basic. I have so many fond memories of those machines!

    2. ICodeForFood*

      Your name “Anon Again… Naturally” cracked me up… and now that song is stuck in my head!

  123. Space Cadet*

    The last place I worked put out an RFP for a program that would create and maintain a product critical to our work with clients. We were quoted a reasonable $250K for what we wanted. The decision-makers got deep into the weeds with the prospective vendor, learning everything they could about the proposed program, and then turned down the proposal at the last minute.

    They handed off the proposal materials to an in-house, junior developer, then later hired a team of 6+ people (each salaried for at least $50K) to manually move these products through the wildly insufficient program that created them. Oh, we also had a vendor who used their own in-house program to develop these products and then export them into our program for use, since our program couldn’t complete it at the rate we needed.

    I’ve since moved on from this nightmare, and that program has been hobbling along for over a decade, begging to be put out of its own misery with each new bandage slapped upon it to keep it marginally functional. But it’s the pride and joy of the IT group, and they will never let it die.

    The former employer is considered to be top-tier in the field of innovation.

  124. Storm in a teacup*

    When I left the UK National Health service 6 years ago, we still used fax machines daily.
    Multiple uses – mainly to send and receive medical notes from General practices and to send prescriptions to our home delivery services.

    1. Caz*

      Current NHS staff here – we don’t any more! They’ve all gone! There was a nation-wide drive about…yeah, 5 years ago.

    2. RedinSC*

      Oh, here in the US hospitals and medical systems still use fax machines to send medical notes. Email is NOT SECURE!

      So, we still have a fax machine and eFax.

  125. Tiny Orchid*

    I used to work for a nonprofit that had big growth ambitions. They developed a chart of accounts with eight segments, if I remember correctly. (For reference, my current organization is four times the size and has four segments in our chart of accounts).

    The COO at the time was an Excel wizard, so he created an expense reimbursement form that did everything semi-automatically. You put a number in, it whirred for a second, then you got the options for the next segment. He left, and not long after the organization decided that eight segments were just too many.

    But nobody could fix the expense reimbursement form! So for every expense, there were two segments that you needed to fill out with just zeroes, and wait for the whirr of Excel doing something behind the scenes.

    When I left the organization, several years later, they were still using this form and just doing virtual gymnastics to keep using it rather than fixing it.

  126. Caz*

    The department I worked for used a clinical system that didn’t talk to any other clinical systems. Someone called in to book an appointment to look at his shoulder pain. Part of our SOP when booking an appointment was to check all the details we had, which included their next of kin. His NOK was recorded as his wife. He’d injured his shoulder caring for her…in her last days of life. She was now deceased and he was taking the first steps toward caring for himself again. I have never apologised so much or so sincerely. (The system was happily updated to one that *does* talk to other systems within the year!)

  127. Anonymous Pygmy Possum*

    I used to work as a software developer at a company whose combination source control and ticketing system was so outdated and out of support that they had to “steal” the source code for it and maintain it themselves. My partner still works there, and they still use it. Granted, switching to Git & JIRA or another source control system would require a lot of effort and time that they didn’t really have room for, but we really tried to make the case for it. The people who maintain the source control and could have helped make the switch don’t want to, and the people who want to make the switch don’t know enough about the inner workings of the old source control and aren’t given enough time to bring the company into the modern age.

    1. Anonymous Pygmy Possum*

      To add to this: At the beginning of September, the server hosting the outdated source control crashed and lost a week’s worth of backups, right before a big install at this company’s biggest customer. So every change to the codebase in the past week was gone, including some huge bug fixes. Luckily, the IT manager at the parent company had an offsite backup that had updated the night before, but for about 4 hours the whole company was freaking out. And yet they still aren’t moving to Git.

    2. Anon for this*

      I actually ended up co-leading a migration from a madly outdated source control system to git as a junior developer, and it’s still one of the proudest moments in my job history. The good news was that of the ten developers we had, nine of us were all for it and we managed to steamroll the tenth and his worries that without exclusive checkouts chaos and anarchy would reign (me calling out to my colleague going “hey, you’ve got file X checked out, are you using it? Because I need to work on it!” used to be a regular occurrence in my daily work). Also – as a senior developer who started later informed me – any mid-level developer or higher would treat a switch of source control systems that drastic as an obvious “burn down the history and start over” moment, but since we were all juniors we didn’t know any better, and I actually figured out a way of not just migrating the full history while cleaning it up, but doing an incremental migration in which projects could switch over from the old source control to the new one one by one as they had time with no loss of history (some very important projects not having time to get onboarded with the new system right then was of deep concern to the boss, so this was one of the ways we could get it signed off).

      And ever since I have only used git at work, and lived in the beautiful world where branching is possible, code review is possible, the full repository lives locally so you don’t need internet access to do work, and two people can work on the same file at once. Even if I still occasionally have nightmares about exclusive checkouts.

  128. NMitford*

    I had one fundraising job at a college where, at some point in the misty reaches of time, a significant investment had been made in purchasing an Addressograph system to manage the mailing list. If you’re not familiar with it, it used metal plates that were run through a machine and stamped an address onto an envelope so that you could do mass mailings. These metal plates were maintained in trays/drawers, and there was an enormous number of trays of these plates for each graduate (the school had 20,000-ish alumni at the time) as well as for current and former parents, friends of the college, local businesses, and other categories of donors. Furthermore, there were two plates for each graduate — one in a set of trays that were maintained in Zip Code order, for bulk rate mailings, and another in a set of trays that were maintained for each graduating class, for reunions.

    So, there were cabinets upon cabinets of these trays (like the biggest card catalog you’d ever seen), the machine you fed the trays into that did the stamping, and a machine that you used to create new metal plates when a class graduated and was added to the alumni rolls or when someone’s address changed. If someone made a donation, there was a little tab you could add to their plates to prevent their plate from stamping, but the little tabs often broke, so I had to frequently apologize to people who’d made a contribution that year but continued to get fund raising appeals.

    The room in which all this was house was the size of a classroom, and maintaing this system and addressing envelopes consumed at least 2.5 full-time-equivalent employees (the employees also ran the college’s mail room). The system was old and finicky at the time, and I was told that the repairman from Addressograph was on campus with enough frequency that he’d periodically buy 15-meal cafeteria cards because that offered him a discount over buying individual meals.

    I will confess that this was long enough ago that the college’s other records were on a big mainframe, but computers were available at the time and were being widely used in college and university fund raising.

    But, holy crap, the drama that was involved in trying to get the alumni and other mailing lists moved onto the mainframe was astounding. That system had been expensive, and the college was determined to get its full investment back. I worked on it for three years, working closely with the college’s computer programmer to develop a plan for migration, to no avail. I only succeeded in getting new classes onto the computer, but not the people whose names were on those darned metal plates. They were still using Addressograph when I moved onto another job, about three years after Addressograph declared bankruptcy and started its decline into non-existence.

    1. MsM*

      Well, now I feel guilty for complaining about our inefficient list maintenance. It truly could be so much worse.

  129. Oxford Common Sense*

    I just found out that my boss keeps a paper chron file. It’s been about 20 years since I’ve worked for anyone that does that.

  130. Jake*

    I work in construction as an estimator. We were temporarily renovating the office, and my boss was very concerned that an old school plan table (holds a 36×24 sheet of paper at an angle, at standing height) wasn’t part of my requirements because, “trust me, you’ll end up needing it.” I can estimate on a computer in less than 10% of the time it takes me on a hard copy of drawings.

    I went 2 years without touching it, and it just became a storing spot for trash. We then decided to do the final permanent renovation of the office. It took hours and hours of arguing that I don’t want that table in my office acting as a trash can for everybody else’s garbage. I finally had to say that either I work from home full time (I already worked from home 1-2 times a week) or we eliminate the table because I was not going to work in the same room as the table.

    It took weeks of deliberation before we finally got rid of it on a trial basis.

    That was 2 years ago, and I’ve never once seen anybody wish it was there.

  131. Nilsson Schmilsson*

    At my last job, which was customer support for one of the world’s delivery services that doesn’t have brown trucks, we were prohibited from deleting any info in a customer file. We could add some things, but in order to delete, it had to go through the sales team. Then they laid off most of the sales team. And wouldn’t tell us which salesperson was assigned to a particular account. So former customers would continue to be called on their cell phones and even have deliveries made to home offices that weren’t meant for them. No amount of pleading or cajoling could change anyone’s mind. And the saddest part was…no one in corporate management cared.

  132. Daughter of Ada and Grace*

    The timekeeping system we used at my current job when I started was so annoying. Every other week, you had to go in and enter your time. (Mind, this is for a salaried, exempt position with no billable hours.) This would be annoying enough if that was all we had to do. But the way we had to do it was even worse.

    There was a row of boxes under each day of the pay period where you would put in how many hours you had worked that day. And then at the end of each row was a dropdown where you would pick what time code it would be charged to. If you had more than one type of time code (regular, holiday, sick, vacation, jury duty, bereavement…) you had to enter another line and put in the hours that got charged against that code. If you took a long weekend over a holiday, you could easily have 3 lines, each with only one or two days filled out. Then double that, because our pay periods are every two weeks and you had to fill out each day of each week.

    And despite having to manually enter all this, it was darn near impossible to figure out how much sick or vacation time you had left. There was no way to request vacation time approvals in the system – those were up to each manager to figure out how to handle.

    Meanwhile, the training on how to enter your time was from a previous iteration, when you still had to fill out paper forms for all of this.

    (We have since switched to an up to date system where we only have to enter sick and vacation time, and can request vacation time through the system, and check our time off balances… No one misses the old system.)

    1. allathian*

      Reminds me of the old timekeeping system at my job. I work for the government in Finland and we keep track of working hours for HRM purposes, as required by our collective agreement We had fobs to clock in and out, although our work hours were fairly flexible even then. Once a month, we got a report from the time clock system, and then we had to manually enter the times and codes into the timekeeping system. Only problem was, the timekeeping system was ancient and used a decimal system, so that 1.1 hours was 1 hour 6 minutes. It was nominally a GUI, but the logic was CLI all the way. You also couldn’t search for codes by name, only by typing the first few digits and *, or by asking for the whole list of codes. It took me at least two hours every month to do this. Correcting any errors was a huge pain.

      Our current system is much better. Codes are searchable and we’re trusted to log our hours correctly in 15-minute increments and there’s no time clock.

  133. Carole from Accounts*

    At a former employer, I once took over the billing and revenue function from someone who was leaving the org. It’s pretty normal to have revenue in Excel, lots of companies don’t invest in ERP’s or ERP functionality that does the calcs for you. It’s another thing to have all the billing info in Excel – it’s not meant to be a database and after a certain number of entries it gets crashy and calculates so slowly.

    The company had a proprietary software that spit out the daily investment totals by investment product. There were 20 different investment time options across 15 different products for each day. We were updating 20 tabs on 15 spreadsheets DAILY to calculate compounding interest due back to the daily investors and commissions due to the company. The commission calculations were insanely complex (like take the average monthly compound interest of options 1-10 times one factor and the daily interest of options 11-20 times another), and varies by product to product.

    I ended up transitioning every other project I’d been working on to other coworkers and just spent the whole month maintaining these spreadsheets and answering questions from product about calculations, or tweaking them after advice from legal. I also spent a ton of time just waiting on them to load or recover from crashes, as some had over 6000 rows of data that were all being calculated.

    We had a company wide meeting where our CEO announced we were expanding into two new markets and would be offering products in different currencies. Everyone in sales was stoked. Everyone in finance and legal looked nervous. I demanded a meeting with the CFO to get the timeline and make clear that the spreadsheets could not do existing calculations PLUS currency exchange calculations. I was told to not worry, because (and I quote) “it’s just math, you’ll figure it out”.

    I explained that “just math” sent people to the moon, but I wasn’t about to do that calculation in Excel and present it to auditors as functional! My case was that we needed a database, fast, and extra help to get the calculations right before we started selling the foreign currency products. I was told the contracts were already signed and investments were already being sold and I better buckle in and figure it out. I was hoping the CFO would see the danger that put us in, but our discussion went nowhere.

    Unfortunately then, the CFO went on the offensive, telling people I wasn’t qualified for my job, that I was trying to hold the company back or ruin it with rumours, telling me that I was overreacting, telling my coworkers that I was trying to stir up problems… Most people knew me and knew my work and trusted that I was just trying to save the company from a really serious mistake (like selling financial products without correct safeguarding purposes).

    Finally I had to get our outside auditors involved. They were already at my desk daily because of the extra testing on billing calculations for prior and current year, so once the foreign currency billings hit current reporting month data, they had SERIOUS CONCERNS and they bundled my report into a report to the board. We got approval from the board to get the resources we needed, but I’d already put out my resume and my last act at the company was the completion of the Excel to Database migration (along with some really brilliant outside support). That project has helped me land multiple other jobs and I’m super grateful for the experience, but I never want to live through that kind of stress ever again.

    1. Strive to Excel*

      I don’t think I know any words strong enough to express my opinion that would be safe for this board.

      So, as a former auditor, I’m going to content myself with NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE.

  134. Angstrom*

    As much fun as these are, I do have some sympathy for the hoarders. I’ve seen far too many new systems forced on workers without the proper training and support. I can’t blame people for holding onto what they know if the new thing hasn’t been properly explained and integrated.
    Managers who don’t think past “It’s new! It must be better! They’ll love it!” deserve a large part of the blame for the reluctance to change.

    1. London Calling*

      *I’ve seen far too many new systems forced on workers without the proper training and support*

      Preach. I left exjob for exactly this reason (or rather, it was the last straw). We had a system that was perfect for back office but lousy for reporting – but the CFO wanted to look good to HO with his reports, so Business Central it was; and who cared if back office took three times as long to do stuff and couldn’t pull the data off because we hadn’t bought that bolt on bit yet? I have never loathed a system as much as I loathe that one.

    2. Rainy*

      My last job switched scheduling platforms from one thing to another because, essentially, the campus coordinator for the shitty system wouldn’t have a job if she didn’t get everyone to use it, so she gave everyone the full-court press. It didn’t work for graduate students at all. The campus switched to an online platform intended for use by all students and student support offices, including the campus clinic, counseling services, etc that *didn’t work for graduate students*. It was an R1 university with a lot of graduate students.

    3. Trapezius Milkington*

      Absolutely not wrong on this, we had so much pushback when we switched to digital timesheets and both sides were right. Yes digital timesheets would be better and easier, we all knew this, however the powers that be had only purchased a very basic version of the software that was ill-suited to the complexity of our timekeeping. We were finding bugs daily plus finding out that management didn’t actually know how we were being paid. Nobody in charge knew some of the plants were still physically punching in with a timeclock. It was 6+ months of weekly meetings before everything got resolved.

    4. EllenD*

      Fully agree. A full and comprehensive review of processes is needed to fully understand how an organisation handles things. There are always nuances. I was told nearly 40 years ago, where a company wanted to computerise its payments systems – at this time nothing of the shelf – the guy writing the programme spent hours going through the processes – eg how leave, overtime, etc – was handled. Then testing it on the process. Only at the final stage for someone to say ‘Oh, how will it handle this group of 100 people, who are non-standard?’. It was much harder to retrofit these exceptions in at the end, than to plan at the beginning. When you’re manually handling a process volume is the problem, when you automate it’s the exceptions or quirks. Now the problem is that new systems are all of the shelf and they try to force the organisation to fit with what others do, as that’s cheaper to buy.

  136. sara*

    I feel all you government folks! I worked for several years from about 2015-2019 as a software developer on a product that was implemented at the state/county/local government level.

    I was their first front-end/user interface-focused developer (at a company that had been around for a decade) because in most cases the functionality we’d be replacing was either paper forms or some sort of system that had no graphical user interface (generally paperwork filled in by people and then entered into a DOS-like interface by clerks).

    We also had to support scarily old versions of web browsers – like ones that had been deprecated and no longer supported with security patches – because the staff users of our web app couldn’t change browsers on their computers. The polyfills were madness!

  137. Sociology rocks!*

    Well today just gave me one. It’s the government so not my system, but still a bad system. I have been uploading completed supplementary documents to a clearinghouse as require for our project since it’s funded by USAID. I hit enter, think it would select the information in the drop down menu I wanted on the form. Nope. It just submitted the half finished form. Can’t go back to edit it in any way. And the form is one of those embedded things with a separate scroll bar from the webpage that doesn’t adjust or scale if you make the webpage less than full screen. Its a pretty easy task and I’ve procrastinated it for 6 months because the upload website is such a pain to use.

    1. Lady Lessa*

      Sympathy. I have to do a government report to California annually, and love the date its due. (April Fool’s Day). The website claims that spreadsheets with the data can be uploaded, but I haven’t figured how to set one up to upload properly. I’m just glad that our switch to a massive computer system, so that we use the same across the larger company isn’t scheduled to go live until afterwards. I will worry about 2026 later.

  138. TootSweets*

    I had a summer (paid) internship in a local government department. Each case had a paper file where all documents related to that individual/business was stored. Case files had a numeric identifier and the client name. All the files lived in a giant freezing cold storage room off the side of the building. When case files were being re-filed after they had been reviewed, the person putting them back could choose to file them *either* by number, or by client name. It gave the day a choose-your-own-adventure frisson. So every single file I had to pull for review could either be stored in the A-Z part of the windowless bunker, or the 1-9999999 part of the bunker. I spent hours in that damn room!

  139. VoPo*

    Day one at a job, and I was shocked to learn that for internal instant messaging they used… AOL Instant Messenger. They only switched off of it when AIM literally did not exist anymore. That company also used an ancient phone service that I was only able to convince them to change when the phone service company declared bankruptcy. Not a very tech savvy office.

  140. History Nerd*

    This is so much of my current job. My grandboss hates change and almost always finds a way to change something back.

    The finest example of this is our filing system, which I’m pretty sure she designed herself. Each year, when the fiscal year ended, everyone in the office had to stop their regular work and “transfer” the files. When I first arrived, this was a physical process – literally every file in the office was returned to the filing cabinets, where some of the content would be removed for “permanent” filing (that no one can actually access because it’s not in any particular order) and the rest would get a new filing number. Since many of our files extend through multiple years, that would mean putting a sheet in the file with both of their previous file number and their new file number on it, so we could look it up in the digital organization system. We would also print new labels for every single file and then take turns applying these labels to the old files to update them with their new number. These already-inane labels were typed out one at a time before being printed.

    Over the years, we’ve made some changes so that this year, almost none of that had to happen. We started converting to digital files a couple of years ago. Just yesterday, after some issues with sending and receiving emails with an external partner, my grandboss tried to tell me that they’d have to start mailing physical information to us again! This year, the innovation was to stop changing the file numbers. We’ve only had that in place for about 2 weeks at this point but we didn’t have to print new labels and in the future, I hope it will mean that we don’t have to go through a long list of possible file numbers anymore to find what we’re looking for!

  141. urguncle*

    I worked for a company that refused to use an API to transmit information or call a JS library in their script. We were asking customers to put enormous blocks of code directly onto their pages and then making them grab information via SFTP. Having to explain this on every support call while some head of IT talked to me as if this was my personal decision and if they yelled at me enough I’d open the curtain to our secret VIP API and JS library really made me move on as soon as humanly possible.

    Oh also my first job in 2010 used Lotus Notes for email. Have not seen that before or since.

  142. What a relic*

    Listen to this relic… I worked at a long-running magazine. We had a kind of “desperately seeking” matchmaker section at the back, where readers could submit letters like “I’m a single woman, 41, looking for a loving partner who enjoys…”. It’s been going since the fifties. When the lady who ran the column retired, we realised she had been using the submission guidelines from the fifties – if you were a widow/widower, you had to include your spouse’s stamped and certified DEATH CERTIFICATE to prove that you are now truly single.

  143. spcepickle*

    I work for the state government – So solidarity with all my other government folks.
    I work in construction – we report all our safety incidents in an archaic on-line system that nobody can figure out how to get data out of. I offered to create a google or Microsoft form and was told NO – we paid for this! I guess it makes our safety numbers looks really good.

    1. anxieties, attack!*

      OMFG. I have qualms with my company’s injury reporting process but it could really be so much worse!

  144. Not on board*

    Work in a business that started in typewriters. Old typewriters and their parts took an obscene amount of storage space because “one day the computers and technology will fail and we’ll need typewriters”.
    Given that:
    a. unless they’re manual, typewriters still require electricity which would be in short supply
    b. if it comes to that, nobody is going to be worried about typing things up
    We have managed to get rid of a lot but still have more than is necessary.

  145. Seriously?*

    I was part of a team responding to various incidents 24/7 and each needed documentation but using a different form, depending on the type of incident (reasonable). The forms were all printed/photocopied and we would fill them out by hand (less reasonable as we had an iPad used by whoever was responding at that time). And then at the end of your shift you would…. Photograph each form with that iPad to then put all the pictures of the forms into a single word document. (Wildly unreasonable). Which was then I believe printed out by the day crew (hard even for me to believe as I type this)
    Suggestions to use the iPad to put the information into the form directly were dismissed outright. How could we do that when the forms were printed?! Requests for the word doc of the forms were waved off as impossible.
    Systems have actually improved since I left that role but my mind still boggles. My flabber remains gasted.

  146. Telegrams*

    There’s a note in our documentation for our ERP software that “previously to 2015, code #### was used for telegrams”.

  147. Bluebonnet*

    I work at a special collection library where a past director insisted on creating their own call number system instead of using a mainstream one such as Dewey.

    We have since switched to the Library of Congress call number system for all incoming books. However, we have not had the time or staff resources to integrate the older books into this mainstream call number system.

    Therefore, even today, the older books are isolated in their own little cove away from the newer books. This definitely can cause confusion at times.

    1. JustaTech*

      I briefly worked at an Ivy League university library where the cataloging department was still catching up on the switch from their private call number system to the LOC. So every book had a LOC barcode, but often when you scanned it, nothing came up in the catalog. Or it would have the title, but it would say “Volumes 1-85”.
      Not all of these books used Arabic (or even Roman) numerals, so I was often left trying to type up a preservation report on “a book in this series”.
      Hopefully they’ve caught up by now.

  148. foofoo*

    My company has an in-house custom built content management system. It’s been weird, quirky, buggy and just a royal PITA since it first launched and half of engineering’s time is taken up making fixes and adjustments to it. It’s no small secret to the users that it’s not great at what it’s supposed to do but it’s better than what we had before.

    During a meeting when someone mentioned issues with it, I said “yeah it’s got its problems, it’s best to just work around these and let us know and we’ll try to fix it but sorry, this is what we have and it’s doing its best”. My manager was in the meeting and after that I got called in to his office where I was sternly told We Do Not Talk Shit About The Software. Ok? I mean…. there’s been problems with it since it launched, do you want me to tout how amazing it is when it loads up and no data is actually shown because it just hiccuped and forgot to display it?

    Upper management absolutely does not want to criticize this CMS (outside of my current/new manager who’s pretty up front that this is a hot mess and we’re doing our best with it).

  149. Tradd*

    I’m a customs broker here in the US. We have to retain records, paper OR electronic, for five years. Most brokers at this point are all digital. Not the small one I work for. There are many reasons this didn’t happen before me. There are hurdles before it can be done. If you want to move from paper to digital records retention, you have to get permission in writing from Customs. I print the bare minimum for files. Trying to get the other coworker in my department to print the bare mininum is a challenge.

    And as for outdated procedures – coworker in my department STRONGLY dislikes using simple software to merge multiple PDFs into one file to send docs to Customs electronically. He will print everything out (stuff that didn’t have to be printed before for file bare minimum), even if it’s 50 pages, scan it in, THEN pitch everything! I’ve showed how to do it many times. I run circles around folks in my office with regards to tech.

  150. Brownie*

    My boss refuses to allow me to change or document his 15+ years worth of custom *nix scripts that run everything from our backups to server setups to inventories to upgrades and code releases. The last time any changes were allowed it was because we were changing operating system versions and some of the libraries he was using had changed locations. Actual improvements to the scripts based on new tech or changes in infrastructure are totally forbidden unless he thinks of it himself, input from other people isn’t allowed. And the documentation is not allowed because he thinks that would lead to people going in to change the scripts, breaking them and causing people to complain to him. I’m counting the months until he retires and those scripts become mine to update!

  151. Introvert girl*

    Around 15-20 years ago it came to light in the news that the Belgian ministry of Finance, who had forced the people to send in their tax letters in three-fold, were throwing out 2 copies immediately after receipt. It seems that someone somewhere a couple of decades ago had decided they needed three copies but the people working at the ministry only needed one copy. But everyone was afraid to say something. After it came to light and every single newspaper wrote about it, the minister decided one copy was enough.

  152. H.Regalis*

    The company I work for does a big charity thing every year. Each department has little events, like hot dog day, silent auctions, bingo, guessing games, etc. All the proceeds go to various charities.

    The thing my department has is something we can fully automate, but when we asked the higher-ups if we could build something within our existing software to do this so no one has to manually do anything, they said no. I got roped into doing this two years in a row and now finally the department head is taking it on himself to do this year.

  153. Tradd*

    Another one – I’m a customs broker and many of our shipments come from India. I’m told India is still a very paper-based society in many areas. Shippers in India would send us paper documents via Fedex when there was no reason to. So many Fedex envelopes! Oh my! What really irked me is that the paper size used in India is bigger than US letter size so the pages stuck out of the folder! I took me probably two years to convince these shippers that all I needed was a legible EMAILED copy of the documents. I used the “save your money” angle with them. I only got them to stop sending me the paper in the last year or so. It had to have cost at least $50-$60 to send the docs via even the cheapest Fedex service.

  154. E*

    I worked for a construction company where everything was tracked on paper and excel. Crew time sheets, customer invoicing, estimating, project scheduling & management were all on paper and then entered into various excel sheets. The papers were scanned and then filed in case technology went away. This was not a small company, but one that grossed $25 million a year with close to 300 employees and up to 40 concurrent project ranging from $25k to $5 million. I was a project manager and it was nuts. I left in 2020 and they were still doing this, I now work at a normal place where we use wonderful software to track things!

  155. Laura W.*

    This happened around 2010. I was at a nonprofit with around 25 employees, about half part-time. Because some people liked to use paper calendars, we were not allowed to share our Outlook calendars with each other. Instead, every Monday, it was expected that people either print off their weekly calendar from Outlook or copy their week from their paper calendar and put it in a three ring binder at the front desk. If you needed to know where someone was, you had to visit the binder and find their calendar.

    Of course, calendars in the binder did not get updated throughout the week so we only knew what was happening as of Monday morning. Everyone in leadership treated this like it was a completely normal solution for people who had different preferences for using technology.

  156. An Australian in London*

    I was employed at an organisation where employee expenses required entering them into an Excel spreadsheet, which was printed and signed by one’s manager.

    The signed paper copy was then faxed or overnighted to head office, where the forms were entered into a new Excel spreadsheet by hand from the signed paper version.

    This newly entered form was then printed to be signed off by the Financial Controller. Those signed forms were then – you guessed it – entered by hand into another Excel spreadsheet.

    With 100+ employees submitting 1-2 expenses forms per month, it’s a wonder there weren’t more human errors introduced. I’m pretty sure the company employed someone full time handling all of this.

  157. I'm just here for the cats!!*

    this sort of fits but when I started we still were using paper records for some of the medical records. There were some things electronic but a lot of paper consent forms and informational forms. I was the first person in this new role that was partially created to help with scanning the paper forms into the electronic medical record system. The director said that they don’t think they would ever move away from paper forms. Then 2020 happened and we were forced to go completely electronic. And they all found out that it wasn’t bad to have everything electronic. There are still a few things that need to be paper, but I think the amount of scanning I do for an entire year equals about a weeks worth of what I did before.

    1. Bookworm*

      I have terrible handwriting and I’m always irked when I go to the doctor and I’m given a stack of forms to fill out about HIPPA, etc., every time. Not once a year, every visit. Office staff complains they can’t read my handwriting. The practice has a patient portal. I always ask why they don’t have online forms for me to fill out. Other doctors I’ve gone to recently have that. All the paper irks me so much I’m considering switching doctors.

      1. Orv*

        Of my two medical providers, one has a portal that makes me fill out the same forms every time, and often crashes halfway through, and the other has a portal but has never given me a login for it and it’s unclear how to get one.

    2. Strive to Excel*

      At OldJob, 2020 forced so many of our audit clients into transitioning away from paper. A lot of very bad things happened in those year but *that wasn’t one of them*.

  158. HigherEdEscapee*

    In a prior job in academia – I worked in a program where the program head had a digital infrastructure that was completely different than the rest of the rather large department. Their calendar ran on a different platform, their program website, everything was different. I was the program manager and wore a ton of hats, including updating the website.
    It added hours to basic tasks to move everything back and forth from Program Head’s systems to Everyone Else’s Systems. This included my own email, calendar, web, etc. Nothing was simple. Ever.
    It ultimately took 5 years, a feasibility study, additional staff coming on board, and hundreds of hours of work, on top of the direct intervention of the ED (at least twice!), to force this one individual to use the same systems as the other 100+ staff members.
    This is part of the reason I no longer work there.

  159. juliebulie*

    I feel like this is my entire job – doing procedures and following rules that date back to before I was born. We adhere to standards that have been superseded many times. Some of these things would cost a fortune to modernize, but we should also consider the cost of doing things inefficiently.

    And yet, one of the company’s mottos is “Dare to Disrupt.” Go figure.

  160. H.Regalis*

    My boyfriend works for a nonprofit that provides temporary housing to people in crisis situations. The building is basically like a big hotel or boarding house. There are over a hundred people staying there at any given time.

    The old executive staff decided to buy consumer appliances, HVAC system, electrical, etc. because “it’s cheaper” but a dishwasher meant for a family of five, for example, burns out super fast when it’s being used for a hundred people, so they had to replace the “cheaper” appliances and systems multiple times a year until the cost added up to more than professional models would have cost if they’d just gone with that from the beginning, not to mention the endless and completely unnecessary crises of broken water heaters, fridges, air conditioning systems, etc. The new executive staff have more common sense and this is finally going away.

  161. C in DC*

    About 15 years ago, I served on a project team to automate our organization’s processes. One unit insisted that we automate a form exactly as it was in paper “because our customers want it that way”. So, we ended up in 2010 with a data collection form that was a perfect example of 1998 technological capabilities. I’ve since left the organization and am now on the customer side. The form has been updated some, but it still functions like a paper form. They would be better served using a fillable PDF than keeping the online form.

  162. teensyslews*

    I spent 2019-2021 working on a huge systems upgrade for one of the nodes in our network. I thought the implementation went remarkably smoothly, especially given the constraints – working through the great shutdown of 2020, restrictions on who was allowed to give on-site support (including no one from the software company able to be on-site), a drastically understaffed project team. The node was back to it’s full capacity within 2 months, issues were minimal and mostly related to system integrations not specific to the new software, and the new software was upgradeable, widely used in the industry, and did everything we needed. Additional rollouts should be even smoother.

    Did any of that matter to the rest of the nodes? No, no it did not. When they were told they were going next, there were tantrums. Threats. They wanted to keep their 30-year-old homegrown software that has 3 people on this planet to support it. I left in early 2022 and as far as I have heard, no other site ever upgraded.

  163. Nell Driscoll*

    We didn’t start using digital calendars to schedule meetings until 2023 (I know). This wasn’t a generational thing or a case of poor tech skills: we just all preferred paper calendars. I think there was a general sense that what we were doing wasn’t efficient, but the org had constant crises from being wildly underfunded and it wasn’t causing enough problems to be prioritized over, say, ensuring we had coverage on our public service desk or resolving whatever building crisis had reared its head. When we got a new director, she started sending calendar invites via Outlook and there was just kind of a collective “huh. Maybe it’s time to try this” among our full-time staff. The benefits and efficiencies were pretty immediate and the consensus among the management team was that we probably should have done it years ago.

    1. Orv*

      I’m weird; I keep both. The reason is I’m kind of ADHD, and the act of writing something down helps fix it in my brain in a way that typing it somehow doesn’t.

      1. Nell Driscoll*

        It’s funny you should say that: there were multiple cases of confirmed or suspected ADHD on that team (we bonded a lot over executive function struggles) and I kind of wondered if that could be connected.

        1. London Calling*

          I had this discussion today with a friend and we agreed that we prefer paper over phones because on phones you can delete but on paper you just put a line through the diary note once it’s done and there’s a weird satisfaction in looking at all the ticked off items.

          1. Mutually supportive*

            I saw a useful comment on a previous AAM article that was about strategies for coping with ADHD and one that loved was having both a “to do” list and a “tah Dah!” list.

            When a task is done, you move it to the “tah Dah!” list, and you can also add the things you’ve done that weren’t on the “to do” list in the first place. Now you can look back at all the things you’ve achieved on that day :)

            I don’t use it for work but I find it very helpful to keep myself motivated when I have a day of doing jobs around the house.

  164. Diana*

    My non-profit was the last organization to use a specific piece of software in the entire US. We had consultants come in who told us that and even made a little cartoon “superman” of the one guy in IT who could manage it. This was maybe 10 years ago and we finally switched systems, but twice, because the first time it was personalized so thoroughly to what we “needed” that it couldn’t be supported by the company.

  165. Annamakesthings*

    Our sales team gets requests from clients to have mockups made by our art team. For years, their procedure was to just forward the emails the the admin pool so the admins could load them into the CRM. They weren’t reviewing the requests at all, would just forward them along. There was no way to keep track of how long it had taken for requests to go to the inbox, how many cases were waiting to be entered, if a single email had 1 request or 30. It sucked.

    We made a request sheet. Sales doesn’t have to put them in the CRM, we know it’s clunky and takes a long time, but they do have to put it in the request sheet. Just a little info about the client and what their mock-up should look like. Lord the pushback. Heaven forbid they take the >2 minutes to review what their client wants instead of just sending into the void.

    It has made my job (managing the demand on the artists) so much better. I can see now what’s coming up, flex capacity where I need to. The admins love not having to try and understand the client requests. Sales still complains all the time about how loooong it takes, because it’s not as fast as forwarding an email. I love that I get to tell them “too bad”.

  166. Holly.*

    Many years ago I worked for an Architects practice.

    The drawing office had a different numerical filing code for every project, which were not listed anywhere, you just had to know the code. Or hope someone else did, usually Mr J, who literally had worked there since he was 14.

    The admin office filed all projects under the client name. The original client name, didn’t matter if the building had changed hands. No problem, the office manager had been there for decades and knew where everything was.

    Then our two branch offices closed down, and we inherited their drawings, which used the same numbering system. So we had three sets of drawing cabinets, with three sets of identical numbered, but different, projects.

    Then Mr J and the office manager retired, and the rest of the drawing office made redundant.
    I now covered both the drawing office and admin office.

    Everything worked okish, till work dried up further, so my hours were cut.
    This meant the bosses had to find their own drawings and files in the mornings…

    I came in one afternoon to discover a boss close to tearing his hair out.
    “I’m looking for The Bread Warehouse file. I’ve looked under the client names, under B, under W, even under T! Where is it!”
    His face when I had to tell him it was filed under F, as the previous owner of the building was called Mr Friendy…

  167. SusieQQ*

    I used to work in the tech department for an insurance company. One day, somebody from the legal department told us that we weren’t allowed to use the word “incident” to describe service disruptions, customer-impacting errors, violations to security policies, etc. The justification was that in other contexts, the word “incident” has certain meanings and connotations attached to it that aren’t consistent with what we were calling incidents and it might lead to misunderstandings and have unintended consequences.

    The thing is though …. those things are called incidents in the tech world! It didn’t make sense to any of us, but the CTO told us that it was a legal requirement. The inanity of it all was best illustrated by our use of a very popular and standard incident management tool that called things incidents, but… we still weren’t allowed to call it an incident.

    It was very bizarre and everyone just talked about how dumb it was, made some half-hearted attempts at finding a different word, then eventually “incident” crept back into everyone’s vocabulary and no one said anything about it. :shrug: Turns out different fields can use the same word with different contexts and meanings, and the world doesn’t stop spinning because of it.

  168. LMPies*

    Our mail clerk, who has been with the organization 40+ years, no longer delivers the mail to individual employees, instead he puts a huge pile on truly the first available desk that he sees (mine, my next door coworker, our accounting department, the legal department… or truly anyone in the building – wherever he might be), leaving them to sort it out and walk around to hand it out. This has resulted in invoices not making it to our AP department, important legal notices getting to our lawyers, etc. The mail clerk also makes the receptionist send employees emails when they have a package, making the employee come pick them up instead of delivering them (as he is supposed to). This has been addressed many, many, many times, and I’ve provided various alternate solutions and ideas for how to solve this continuous issue, but no one cares to implement any change. Our CEO refuses to do anything about it, because the mail clerk also drives our CEO to and from the airport and does personal tasks for him.
    I often feel as though I’m living in the twilight zone. It is truly the MOST inefficient situation I’ve ever encountered- but “this is how it’s always been.

  169. AtLeastItWontBeMyProblem*

    I work in the education sector (public non-profit) so there are so many. 2 immediately came to mind, though:

    1) We have copiers that are also scanners so you can scan and email a document. When the copiers were set up, the company that performed the set up allowed IT to provide a list of company email addresses to be loaded into the copier to select an email from the list. However, according to the company once that list was loaded, you could add emails manually but there was no way to delete anyone or provide a new list to override the current one. So, we have emails in the copier for people who quit, were fired, were walked out by security, and who have even died. Plus, with the new adds, the list just keeps growing.

    2) Years ago, we had an employee who created a process to scrape information from our database and create a daily report. I’m not sure what language he used to perform this process, but apparently it is something no one knows how to use. This employee has been gone for at least 15 years, and that report is still automatically created, but there is no way to remove fields that are no longer in use (locations, demographics, etc.) without breaking the entire report, so they just keep appearing on the report with no data. I don’t know why there hasn’t been an alternative process created with a language that folks are familiar with, but there will be a day where this report just fails and someone will be scrambling to recreate it.

  170. OhGee*

    I worked at a big institution and reported to two people. My dotted line manager was a control freak and a bully. One of my first tasks was to clean up and organize our team shared drive as part of a required project of our IT department. The system was a mess, in part because we had only a barebones file structure and because we were a team of 20 people with frequent turnover. So I find some documentation that is years out of date. We have the newer versions on hand, but we’ve also retained about six different drafts of this older version. I figure we can save just the final version, right?

    Wrong. Controlling manager (who voiced extreme, high-pitched anxiety about this project from day one) comes to me within 48 hours of me removing this file. Why and how has this *very important file* disappeared? It contained critical information!!

    I admit nothing, wait for detail on why the file s must be retained. I learn she has left an important biographical note about a key client in a COMMENT in this Word doc, which again, is version 3 of 6 of a five year old document that is fully out of date. In a closed office, she vaguely threatens me over this. I go to my actual manager, who has been dealing with this person for years, as well as to my grand boss, and luckily get support to shut her down.

    Folks, we have a sophisticated relationship management database in which we keep this kind of information, so it’s accessible to anybody in the organization who might interact with this person.

    Six years later, that manager has been promoted, changed not one little bit, and probably got somebody to recover her precious Word doc.

  171. J. Pierrepont Finch*

    I once went to work as a general counsel in a large organization that provided services and where, under a system instituted by the office manager, the CEO needed to sign hundreds of documents every few weeks. Most of these documents were routine approvals that others had investigated and ensured were legit. But, because the CEO was off generating business, he really didn’t have time to go through documents like vacation approvals to add his John Hancock. So, the office manager had obtained authority for herself and another staffer to spend a week every month signing the CEO’s name to these actual documents. (I will not even go into what this meant for document filing and storage.) The CEO got pulled back in to the process when his signature needed to be notarized. The whole process was wasteful, but the office manager LOVED it because she was able to compress her work obligations to, effectively, little work and she lorded her authority all over everyone.

    I arrived in late 2019 and it was clear to me that this crazy system had to change, but I bided my time. Then COVID arrived and virtually all management and administrative staff got sent to work from home. Suddenly, there was an incentive to digitize document signing and storage! Interestingly, the documents that the business manager and her favorite staffer took a week out of the month to sign were digitally signed and filed in one day by the CEO’s administrative assistant. And those documents that needed to be notarized? Turns out, two years before I was hired, our state legislature had authorized online notarization. We easily added that to our document-signing mix.

    The office manager retired at the end of 2020.

    1. ICodeForFood*

      Your name, J. Pierpont Finch, makes me wonder if there will be a Benjamin Burton Daniel Ovington among the commenters. (“How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” reference for those who don’t have parts of that script memorized…)

  172. James*

    The redundant photocopies.

    We produced letters to customers, one on letterhead to go out, one on plain to go in their file.

    The 500+ letterhead letters per month were then photocopied, folded, enveloped, franked and taken to the post office.

    The photocopies were put in a dedicated neat pile in a dedicated tray on a dedicated desk and left there.

    The day before the next batch of letters were about to be produced, the photocopies were taken to the shredder in the next room and slowly (maximum of 5 at a time or the machine jammed) shredded.

    Then the process repeated for the next month. This had been going on for at least 5 years before I got there, probably much longer.

    I never found out why, and, more importantly, I was never able to put a stop to it: this was A Thing that we did and nobody – at *any* level in that massive company – was willing to change it.

  173. Trapezius Milkington*

    I worked at a florist in 2018 that was still using paper copies in triplicate to take orders over the phone. Plus using an adding machine for when we took handwritten inventory. It was a small town so that wasn’t astonishing but when some people would ask for a receipt they were mailing them the yellow carbon copy. I started emailing a scanned copy to people when asked and they got very angry with me because “you’ll leave some day and then they’ll expect us to know how to email”. Despite my best efforts for two years they never learned how to scan and attach to email.

  174. iglwif*

    I recently started a new job that can be fairly well summed up as “get existing departments to communicate and work together better”. It’s fun! I like it! The people are great!

    HOWEVER COMMA

    In my first week, I started making a little list in my notebook of the software systems people are using, and I started noticing how many strange duplications there were. For instance, we’re a Microsoft shop, but one team is using Google apps instead (Forms, Sheets, Docs), which prevents easy sharing with other teams. Team A is using one project management tool, Team B is using a second one, Team C is using yet a third — all roughly equivalent tools, used to do roughly equivalent things — and no one is exactly sure how that whole situation evolved but everyone likes their chosen tool best, of course. We have Teams and OneDrive and Sharepoint, but we also have a network drive, dating from (as far as I can tell) before the dawn of time, that we are supposed to be moving away from … together with a non-trivial number of people who insist on storing their files there, based apparently on vibes.

    It is my hope that by the time my contract ends, I will have made some headway …

  175. R*

    My old job used a very outdated version of QuickBooks. The finance team wouldn’t update to a newer version, for reasons that I could never quite grasp. The version they used was so old that it was no longer serviced by Intuit. It also didn’t run on any remotely recent version of Windows. We had staff, including finance staff, in offices in all corners of the world. If an overseas finance staff person’s computer died, this meant two things had to happen:
    1) If that office didn’t already have a CD-ROM of our outdated QB, we had to ship a CD to them, as this version could not be downloaded off the Intuit site.
    2) The overseas office couldn’t just buy the finance staff member a new computer with a modern version of Windows installed. They had to somehow obtain a similarly outdated version of Windows, which isn’t always the easiest thing to do while ensuring it wasn’t a bootlegged copy with rampant security risks.
    Yes, I pointed out that this was a major security vulnerability for our entire organization. No, it did not seem to make a difference to my otherwise risk-averse employer. I left 5+ years ago, and I have no idea if they ever moved to a newer version of QB.

  176. Media Mouse*

    I used to do printouts of my reports’ 6-month and Final Review up until about 7 years ago. Now I just send them the PDF for their personal electronic records and have them read it over during our in-person one-on-ones. (Our system is also a dinosaur and didn’t copy over from the old system 3 years ago, so very thankful for the personal electronic copies.)

    The catalyst for the change? A mouse nibbled through my desk drawer with said 6-month reviews that I had printed out before meetings. (Mouse was eventually caught, but it was horrifying to come into the office to see nibbles on parts of the papers.)

  177. Tall Hobbit*

    This also doubles as a cautionary tale in siloing work.

    My last job had a cataloger who I’ll call Pat who was technically very skilled, but lacked some soft skills and was somewhat prone to lashing out when they didn’t get their way. They built a lot of custom tools/reports for us while they were on staff. These were generally pretty helpful, but no one on staff really had the knowledge and skillset to maintain those systems. When they took a job at another organization, they told my boss they would be happy to help maintain the tools they’d built and work with whoever we hired to replace them. It was all very collegial and friendly.

    Fast forward to a few months later when we were migrating to Windows 10. My boss calls me into his office. I can’t remember the parameters of the original request, but it essentially boiled down to they weren’t sure if those tools would work in the Windows 10 environment and he wanted me to drop everything and focus on ensuring that they did by the end of the week. Now to be clear: this was not my job. At all. This process wasn’t even in my department. However, I had some rudimentary coding knowledge and stronger tech skills than the actual manager of that process, so my boss thought I’d be the best person to handle it. After a lot of back and forth about my (significant) concerns about the project scope and suddenness of the deadline, my boss revealed that while the concerns about the Windows 10 migration were true, the more pressing concern was that Pat had become upset when we had not hired their candidate of choice as for their replacement and was refusing to provide anymore help on system maintenance. Additionally, they had used a personal account to create one of the reports and had made some vague statements about cutting off our access, hence the abrupt and seemingly arbitrary deadline.

    Beyond the fact that this was well outside my job description and probably beyond my skillset, I also had several other deadlines that could not be postponed to deal with this. It’s also worth noting that the process that these tools supported could be completed without them—it just took a little more time. I ended up making a plaintext copy of the code and told my boss that if we had problems post migration, I could try to help, but that I didn’t have capacity to drop everything for something that wasn’t in my department.

    The kicker? Not only were there no issues from the migration (so there was no need for any urgency on that end), when Pat’s replacement finally started, they took a look at some of the tools and said, “this seems like a lot of effort to avoid not that much work.” Some of the stuff the former colleague built was literally just shortcuts for copy/paste!

  178. Pipe Organ Guy*

    Ah, yes. WordPerfect. First off, I’m fluent in Word and WordPerfect. For the weekly service booklets I used to put together (everything for two different Episcopal Church services, including all texts and the music for all the hymns and service music), WordPerfect was the champion. I could make that program jump through all kinds of hoops to use page space most efficiently. If push came to shove, I could do a lot of it in Word, but I had to use a lot more workarounds to get similar results. There were things that WordPerfect could do natively that Word couldn’t do at all; the two packages are just built entirely differently. Fortunately, I never had to fight any battles to keep using WordPerfect; my boss recognized its superiority for what I was doing. There were other places in my work where I could use Word for things it was really good at.

    It’s all water under the bridge, in any case; when I retired, InDesign became the chosen software.

  179. Khai of the Fortress of the Winds*

    Many years ago I was in grad school at a large state university. The library had expanded out of it’s original building to the building just north so the university built a pedestrian bridge from the third floor of the original building to the second floor of the north building. The card catalogs and the reference section were in the pedestrian bridge. Meanwhile another campus of the university decided to downsize it’s library so most of it’s books came to the main, two building library. Unfortunately one library used the Library of Congress cataloging system and the other used the Dewey Decimal system. Instead of recataloging the LC books, the university decided it would be simpler to just house all of the Dewey Decimal books on one side of each room and all of the LC books on the other.

    This was just at the dawn of computer catalog systems, so all of the books were still in the paper card catalogs. Two completely separate card catalogs all in the same pedestrian crosswalk which was the only way to enter the north library. To make things truly bizarre, the ceilings in the north library were much taller than the south library, so while the south library had 5 floors, the north library had three. Somewhere along the line someone decided that the fire escapes on the east and west sides of the south building had to have ceilings the same height as the north buildings which led to several 4 foot tall hobbit doors leading to the fire escape stairs and explains why the pedestrian crosswalk went from the third floor of the south library to the second floor of the north library. Also, for no reason anyone could ever explain, strong winds would randomly blow through the pedestrian crosswalks even though no doors opened from it directly to the outside and there were no open windows. Research in that library gave me very strong legs!

    1. Rainy*

      This reminds me of the library at the large state school where I did my master’s. PhD students could apply for “carrels” in the library–the scare quotes because these were not sane carrels in the slightest. The dedicated carrels were in the stacks, and people would apply for them by location so that they could have a carrel near the bit of the stacks they used most often, which absolutely makes sense.

      The stacks were concrete walls, floor, 6.5′ ceilings, metal shelving bolted to the floor, assorted stairs depending on whether they were on the ends or in the middle, and a freight-style cage elevator. The fluorescent strip lighting was on motion sensors. The reservable carrels were desks with a power outlet and a shelf and about 30 sq ft of floor space, fenced off with a locking gate. Fenced off with FENCE. Specifically, with fancily-bent chain link spray coated black. Occasionally I’d be minding my own business looking for a book and suddenly come upon a PhD student, locked in their carrel like a feral goblin, surrounded by stacks of books and a forest of paper coffee cups, illuminated only by a bare bulb in a clippy desk lamp until I came near enough to trigger the overhead lights.

    2. Good Lord Ratty*

      That’s wild that a post-secondary academic institution would use Dewey! That’s for, like, public libraries and grammar schools.

      1. Youth Librarian*

        During graduate school I worked at one of the few universities in the US that used Dewey. The rule was you couldn’t go beyond 12 decimal points… I assume they still use it, because I don’t see how you could ever recatalog everything.

    3. Martin Blackwood*

      God, this reminds me of a building at my parents/sisters alma mater that legend says was built by two architechs that hated each other. Apparently some students turned on all the lights in thr classrooms they could find and there were still dark windows on the outside. Optimal place for hide and seek, though

  180. Insert Pun Here*

    I work for a company that makes what are essentially bespoke widgets. For the sake of illustration, let’s say that we’re a custom tailor making men’s suits. Every widget we make is a suit (so there are a lot of standard processes and procedures) but each one is different — different fabrics, trims, each cut to size, and the customers have a very, very wide range of temperaments. There is a point in our process where the preliminary pieces of the suit get handed over to another department to do the finishing work. That process was designed in roughly the late 90s and was unchanged for about two decades. It is insanely time consuming and features a lot of duplicated effort. In the past five years TWO colleagues have been hired with “fix this process” as part of their mandate. In that time we’ve determined that 1 (one) database field could safely be left blank and we have outsourced 1 (one) tedious step to a service that takes two weeks to do it poorly enough that no staff time is actually saved, due to having to correct their errors.

  181. Sharkzle*

    Job #1 – I designed and laid out 20-50 page booklets in Corel Draw. This is a program made for illustration, not book layout. So I had to collate the pages, directly in Corel Draw, in the order they had to be printed for booklets. It’s confusing to say the least and this led to many, many misprints. The owner of the company refused to purchase a license for InDesign or any other program specifically made for multi-page layouts. Mind you, he probably would have made more money because the designers could then churn out more books in less time. But that would have made too much sense for this guy.

    Job #2 – Not a company wide system, but one of an individual employee. She was a media buyer and had been for a very long time. She printed out every. single. email. She printed ALL of her emails and then filed them away. This person had like 5 filing cabinets just full of printed emails. When I pressed her on this, she just said she needed to keep them for her records. When we moved offices we also had to move all of her PRINTED EMAILS. Whenever anyone tried to explain to her that she could just back up all of her emails and save them on her computer she wouldn’t hear it. They all needed to be printed wether important or not.

  182. Ceanothus*

    The genetics lab at my grad school was maintained by one incredibly dedicated man on a shoestring budget that included like, a machinist who re-machined parts that broke on our outdated equipment, materials scavenged from biotech startup dumpsters throughout the city, dyes that he re-decanted or home-brewed, machines from the lab that developed southern blots, fume hoods he had built himself…

    This is in addition to the fact that all the software we used was developed by grad students decades ago, and obviously not updated for current systems — there were a few computers kept on Windows 3.0 that had. Many viruses. But could absolutely export a text file.

    One time we did the math and with an extra $250,000 a year our wee university could have afforded to have a safe and sane lab system that didn’t rely on photocopies of mimeographs for reference. We absolutely didn’t have a source for that funding, and resigned ourselves to paying a $12 monthly supply bill while navigating this intricate system.

  183. AC*

    How bills got paid in my job from 2020-2023:

    1. Vendor sends a paper bill. If the bill is emailed, we were supposed to call them and say we need a paper copy.
    2. Employee prints out a paper Check Request, signs it, scans it to the CEO along with the paper bill.
    3. CEO signs the Check Request and scans it back to employee.
    4. Employee places Check Request in bookkeeper’s literal mailbox
    5. One a week, bookkeeper prints paper checks
    6. Bookkeeper sends checks via snail mail to CEO
    7. CEO signs checks and snail mails them back to bookkeeper
    8. Bookkeeper snail mails check to vendor.

    Insanity.

  184. Rainy*

    Some years ago I worked as the payroll clerk for a department at a university (SA-side, for those of you who will immediately understand the level of dysfunction that entails), and the department was still using paper timesheets. The main finance person in the department didn’t want electronic timesheets and had managed to block any move to electronic timekeeping (despite it having been the standard at that institution for many years). She should not have been able to block a change like that, because she had nothing to do with the HR system, but she had set herself up as someone who had to be convinced about changes and people went along with it for some reason.

    I was hired, did the job as I was trained for about three months, and then said “This is untenable!” and simply moved forward with the change from paper timesheets to one of the three (!!) available electronic timekeeping methods available to us at the institution. She kicked up a fuss, insisted that she didn’t approve of the lack of paper trail (it actually provides MORE of a paper trail!), blah blah. I pointed out to leadership that in the three months I’d been cleaning up the time records (EOY leave balance reconciliations hadn’t been done in THREE YEARS!) and processing payroll, I’d discovered multiple people taking advantage of the paper system to “lose” the months they took leave among other stratagems.

  185. Majnoona*

    In my old (academic R1) department, whenever anyone retired someone would say essentially, we must replace that person exactly. Hakeem taught teapot handles and North African teapots so we need someone who can do that. Then someone (ok , it was always me) would say. Actually a lot of our orders are for handless-teapots and Hakeem lived for years in Tunisia and that was a cool elective but we really need the person who knows the most about teapots, is able to teach some of the core teapots courses, and beyond that can teach something really well. Maybe it’s just an academici thing.

    1. Madame Desmortes*

      It’s definitely an academic thing. During my department’s last hiring round, I had to say more than once “if we’re going to cash the curricular checks we’ve been writing for the college, we have to hire people who are different from us.”

      Fortunately I’m in a good-natured department and they saw the justice in this.

  186. kay*

    I work in museums. Another museum in our region had a staff member who kept all their crucial records – important not just for day-to-day work, but for the continuity of the entire institution – in a dead language that they were fluent in. It was a deliberate ploy to keep from ever being replaced. They had never actually been managed before a colleague of mine became their supervisor, and when they refused to change, they were let go and the records had to be translated.

    1. Bruce*

      That is like something out a novel… not sure what genre, but definitely a case of life being stranger than fiction!

  187. McCynic*

    Several examples from my previous job at a CPG company (very lengthy but I have a lot to unload, LOL):

    For years, the B2B division used their personal Outlook accounts for sales tracking. This was one of the largest departments with retail partners across the U.S. plus international distributors. I’m not in sales but even I can tell you this makes zero sense.

    In the ecom division, our department head was enamored of using a whiteboard and post-it notes for project tracking; even after we switched to a highly effective and efficient project management software, she often mentioned bringing back the old “system.” It didn’t register that she was the only one championing ye ol’ post-it notes method and she brushed off our concerns about quitting the PM software (which she threatened at one point).

    During the post-it era, the web designer insisted on printing out all web banners to hand off to the copywriter for updates. The copywriter’s turnaround time was so slow that we’d have to make immediate copy edits directly on the website, then print off these banners and re-insert them into the paper stack. When I suggested a paperless method, the web designer claimed she was more “analog” and insisted we stick with this process. Saying that you’re “analog” in this context really means “I like to make busy work/waste paper and resources” and “Don’t challenge my MO/I hate change.” Sad but true: this took place on the digital team.

    But the real doozy was the ecom platform itself. This was built and managed by one person and if something ever happened to him, the company would be f%#!ed. He was the only one who knew how to do most things on the platform and was extremely reluctant to delegate responsibilities, including hiring additional resources. You do need to be very cautious about platform access and work with trusted people on your team. However, this pattern went on for years and years with no backup solution for PTO or unplanned events. The platform seemed fragile to many of us and there were numerous major issues when he was *not* OOO. One colleague lightly called it a “house of cards” which earned them his terrible wrath, so from then on we never used that term in front of him. We all walked on eggshells around him and adjusted our requests and questions to fit his mood – he could be funny and personable or an absolute terror, on a dime. I don’t have an issue with curmudgeons and used to think these are personality quirks and he’s just being protective of the website, but now realize this was pathological and by design: he was the gatekeeper to the most valuable tool and wanted to keep the company completely dependent on him. He created a situation that made productive project management impossible and even though he migrated to remote working, he made the workplace hell.

  188. Jigglypuff*

    I worked at a public middle school that was part of a large school district with thousands of employees. We were paid once a month, so at the end of, say, October, we’d receive our paycheck for our work in September and also submit one time sheet for the entire month of October.

    At the end of my first month there, I knew I needed to turn in a time sheet, but no one had told me how to fill it out, etc. Luckily, I found a blank time sheet in the files in my desk. I filled it out and brought it to the office to submit.

    Sadly, I was informed that my time sheet was the WRONG COLOR. Apparently all the different categories of employee had their own special color of time sheet, so I stood there for a good twenty minutes while all the office staff debated about which color my type of staff person should have. They finally settled on blue.

    So I took my white time sheet and went to the copy machine and photocopied it onto blue paper. Then I returned to the office again to try and turn it in.

    Unfortunately, I then learned that my time sheet was supposed to be on blue cardstock and that I couldn’t just photocopy it. I had to be given a special blue cardstock time sheet that was kept LOCKED IN A VAULT. So the office staff had to go to the vault and retrieve exactly one blue cardstock time sheet for me. I was not allowed to take an extra one in case of mistakes or to fill out for the next month, etc.

    1. Rainy*

      Okay, I thought my time sheet thing was ridiculous, but that was honestly the height of efficiency compared to yours.

  189. CorporateDrone*

    We were in charge of replacing a large homegrown system and there was a manager whose core job was to generate a very specific report once a week and then use it for decision making.

    So we duly went along to find out what this report was supposed to be displaying. Turned out no one had any clue. They didn’t know what the report was for, they didn’t know what data was being displayed on the x axis or y axis of the included chart, didn’t know where the data was coming from. Titles were obscure. All they knew was if the slope of the line went up, that was good.

    After some detailed forensics we discovered the report relied on data that was long gone and the week by week changes were entirely based on chance. The report was totally useless. The executive attempted to figure out what they expected from the report but eventually gave up and instead focussed on what kind of information would be useful to do their job, but it took almost a year before he was able to accept that he’d been managing based on completely random information and move on to fixing it.

  190. Swix*

    I worked at an office that required many people to drive the company vehicle a few times a month. Some people drove it much more regularly. This required people to fill the vehicle up with gas.

    The way accounting had this set up is that you would use your personal money to fill the vehicle (not cheap, it had a huge tank), submit it to accounting for reimbursement, and get repaid on the next scheduled expenses date. This meant that it could be up to six weeks before getting paid back. Some people were constantly waiting for hundreds of dollars to be reimbursed.

    No one wanted to be the one to fill up the vehicle, so it was a constant game of chicken which meant that you had to assume you would get the keys, realize you had to fuel up, and take time at the start of your trip to fill it up. This obviously annoyed people. So a rule was put in place that you had to fill up if the gauge was at 1/3 full. This rule was regularly ignored.

    Any time someone brought up the issue of the vehicle not being filled, less senior employees would point out that waiting six weeks to get paid back was a problem. Managers would reiterate the rule about filling up at the end of your trip and change nothing. Since managers were usually the ones leaving later than planned to get to a meeting, they were also the ones getting burned most by the gas issue.

    But accounting was super resistant to change, and they were the ones insisting that it was impossible to pay people back for gas any other way. Eventually (two years after I started, many years after the issue started), the CEO was personally inconvenienced by the gas issue. He brought it up in the next office meeting, and was treated to the usual explanations for why no one wanted to fill up the vehicles. This time, the managers also backed up everyone else that the current system wasn’t working.

    Suddenly, accounting was able to repay people directly from petty cash and put a fuel card in the vehicles!

  191. Kammy6707*

    I work at a community college that has 3 main campuses and 2 smaller satellite locations. Everything is super antiquated compared to other schools I have worked at. (My boss is a stickler for paper, so that may be why.) For example, I am the Registrar Office liaison for a dual admissions program with area 4-year colleges. Part of my duties include sending an official transcript to the partner school when the student is accepted into the program. Since we agreed not to charge students and our third-party transcript system has an administrative charge, I send the initial transcript via secure email. You would think this would be easy, right? Just generate a PDF copy of the transcript and attach to the email.

    Well, unlike all the other institutions I have worked at – there is no way to generate a PDF transcript. I must print the transcripts and then physically scan them. I can’t print them on the official transcript paper either, because then the scan shows a watermark that says it’s unofficial. So I have to print them on plain paper. And there are only a few printers that you can print transcripts to so I have to print them to a colleague’s printer. Oh, and because it’s scanned, it reads as an image and partner schools can’t use their scanning tools. So I started having to go in after scanning and select the option to have the PDF identify the text and convert the file to be readable.

    I immediately requested a way to generate a PDF of a transcript. It’s been two years and counting and I’m still printing transcripts and manually scanning them because no one has any time to figure out how to get our SIS to do this!

    Thankfully, we got approval for funding to send the final transcripts via our third-party system. But there is no batch way to do this. I have to request them all one by one. We are talking about 500+ students at the end of each semester.

    We talked the partner schools into accepting degree audits in between the first and last transcript – at least I can batch generate those! BUT the file generated is titled with their ID number. So I have to rename all the files with the student’s name so its easier for the partner schools to process.

  192. Picky*

    When I started working in libraries there were often filing cabinets for small materials that didn’t stand up well on library shelving. In 2009 I started work at a library that had thousands of maps in filing cabinets. This was well into the era of Google maps, so I started going through them to see what we could dispose of. There were pages clipped out of old atlases and guide books, tourist maps of city centers, and a random selection of regular maps with old notations penned in (“good lunch place,” “bus stop for beach bus,” etc.). I asked a colleague about them and she was scandalized that I would get rid of ANY of these treasures: they had spent years scouring sources for maps of hard-to-find locations and bugging anyone they knew who went to exotic locales for donations of their used maps. Additionally, they had devised the *best possible* organizational system, which was alphabetical by the first thing listed on the map. So “France,” “Paris, France,” and “Northern France” were in three different places despite covering the same territory. The co-worker stormed into the library director’s office and demanded I stop after I threw out a map of a country that no longer existed, and I was told to halt work on this project. Emotional manipulation was very effective in this particular workplace.

    1. Good Lord Ratty*

      To be honest, they were right to chastise you when you disposed of an item without permission. Weeding is necessary, but you can’t just chuck stuff because you personally don’t think it should still be in the collection.

      1. Unkempt Flatware*

        Oh that’s not what we’re here to do. Picky responded to an invitation to tell us about archaic work systems. No need to tell them they shouldn’t have done that. We just enjoy the show.

  194. It's Marie - Not Maria*

    Long, long ago in a Galaxy far, far away, my Boss was enamored with Access Databases. We used several for tracking such things as Attendance and FMLA that were glitchy, and got to the point more and more users lost the ability to use them. At the end, there was one user who could use any of them – ME. I limped along as best I could, repeatedly warning them that with one more glitch, I could lose the ability to use them. I provided the powers that be with resources for replacing the Access Databases, only to be brushed off. I was to the point where I was creating electronic hard copy back up files on a weekly basis, so when Doomsday finally arrived, we would only lose a maximum of a week’s worth of data.

    Doomsday finally arrived, and the glitch that shut down everything Access related happened. Our offsite IT did everything they could, but was unable to regain access to Access (the irony was so sweet!) My Boss was freaking out, until I showed her the hard copy backups I had regularly been creating. After a sincere “Thank You” for my foresight, my next task was to transfer the data from the backups to Excel by manually keying it all in (Gee, thanks?) There was no way to convert the backups to any other format at that time, so I spent the next month keying data into Excel, in addition to my regular HR Tasks. They were still using those Excel Spreadsheets a year later when I put in my notice, not feeling it was important enough to get other systems to handle the data. I felt sorry for my replacement, and left them Easter Eggs telling them the story of the G-D Awful Access Databases and why the company was using the Excel Spreadsheets when inexpensive software solutions were readily available.

  196. Picky*

    An organization I worked at was moving buildings. One person ran a solo unit similar to a store-room. She had a full scale melt-down when she found out her new workroom would not be the exact shape and dimensions as her previous room. They tried to convince her it would be nice to have windows. She insisted it would not. She had been working for twenty years without windows and nothing would convince her to have windows. They caved into her bizarre demands and carved out a weird interior space for her the exact shape and size of her previous space. She put everything where it had been in the old building: the place to stack incoming supplies, the place to stack empty boxes, her desk and calculator, every single item. We’re in an earthquake zone so there are seismic pylons in various spots, which could not be in her space because that would change the dimensions. So they put walls up in awkward places that left strange, unusable space all around it. The beautiful large windows were in a narrow corridor that heated up in two seconds when the sun was out. Seismic pylons stuck out into other people’s spaces in awkward spots. The entire floor was wonky to navigate due to this one person’s insistence on The Old Way. And guess what? Six years later she retired. Every single wall had to be taken down and moved to a sensible place, at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars.

  197. Ally McBeal*

    I worked in financial services and our CRM was famously clunky but comprehensive. The sales team finally threw up their hands and begged for a different solution, so we went to Salesforce and the admin team (including me) spent 6-8 months rigorously cleaning up and migrating the data. Then six months later the sales team decided Salesforce was even worse and asked to go back to our old CRM, but of course migration caused as many headaches in reverse as it did the first time. I love database work but I was at my absolute limit after that mishegoss.

  198. Rep (taylor’s version)*

    I once had a credit card from a super small bank in Arkansas but it had an insanely low interest rate. I also moved around a lot. Every time I moved, I had to fax them information verifying that I was me and to please update my address. Several times, they’d come back and say the fax was unclear. The end of it was after one move, where still, years later, they wanted a fax. So I asked if I could cancel the card over the phone. THAT I could do! *facepalm*

    This was all circa 2010 to 2016.

  199. MoMac*

    I worked for many years in a social service organization located in a state forest. It was a former camp. The phone system was a nightmare, and we often heard that people could not get through to us. Initially, I disputed this as my phone was not ringing, and there were no voicemails. But then there were times that I was unable to make calls with my phone.

    It turned out that, for some insane reason, the main phone connection box was located in the well, above the water line, but why??? So whenever it rained, we lost our phones. Mind you, the rest of the organization’s branches were located in the city, so it was bizarre to explain that we were unlikely to be reachable by phone the next day due to the predicted rain. I worked there for 12 years. They used a local company that was willing to go into the state forest, and that was less expensive than other phone options. They were big on using local companies.

    I was there for five years before they moved the phone apparatus out of the well and into a building. I recall having an absolute meltdown at one point and saying to the Senior Director, “Why are you paying money for a phone system that does not have consistent service? The agency is being ripped off!” I don’t know if that was what finally did it or not.

  200. Snow Angels in the Zen Garden*

    The former employer that was still using paper time cards that then had to be manually keyed into the payroll system when I left in 2022. There were at least 700 full-time employees.

  201. Good Lord Ratty*

    My employer (a government agency) still does all our scheduling in Excel.

    Yes, Excel.

    They claim it’s too expensive to use a scheduling software. Given that we don’t even have cutlery in the office kitchen, I know they may have a point, but still. If there’s anything worth spending money on, it’s stuff to make business practices more efficient.

    Then again, it’s government.

  202. Pumpkin215*

    I had a boss that “didn’t trust” technology. It sounds generic, but as he was training me, he proceeded to print out reports and hand write calculations, tallying up amounts.

    I suggested he could use Excel. “I’m not good with that” he says. “No problem! This is why you hired me! Here, let me show you…”. “No. I don’t trust it to add correctly”.

    He didn’t trust Excel to do calculations. EXCEL. Too much room for error. I found a lot of human error in his previous calculations. He was happy to hand over the process to me because it was “too much work”. I asked for the source of these reports and they were in……..Excel.

    1. Brownie*

      When I started my current job the boss at the time didn’t trust any spreadsheet that Excel has sorted because that might have changed the data somehow. Sorting data in Access was fine, but not Excel, and I was told to never send them any spreadsheet that’d been sorted because they’d reject it as having been tampered with.

  203. Cinnamon Girl*

    I worked in a bakery that specialized in cinnamon buns. But there was no cinnamon bun button on the cash register. If someone bought a cinnamon bun we had to wring it up as a babka. It was like this for like 70% of our offerings — we all had to memorize an unwritten baked good conversion chart to ring people up.

  204. MigraineMonth*

    I work in government, and our PTO system is byzantine. To start with, there are at least 9 different categories: sick, vacation, sabbatical, volunteering, wellness, comp time, COVID, bereavement, caregivers leave. Each has its own rules about maximums and expiration.

    By far the most complicated of these is the vacation bucket. Everyone is granted the full year’s vacation allotment at the beginning of December. Any vacation that you do not use before the next December is lost, unless you fill out the form that allows you to roll over a certain number of those hours into the sabbatical bank (assuming you haven’t maxed out that bank).

    Every single year, starting in October, there was a blitz of emails reminding us to go to the website, download the form to transfer hours from vacation to sabbatical and submit it to payroll BEFORE DEC 1st. We got reminders from HR, from payroll, from managers.

    Then, last year, we instead got an email saying that, thanks to [Employee Name]’s brilliant suggestion, they’d decided that instead of requiring every employee to submit a form and requiring HR to process a form for every employee, they would *assume* that employees didn’t want to lose their vacation time and do the rollover automatically. It was a truly shocking development.

  205. Tweet reviewer*

    I once worked at an organization that had a tweet approval process–not the worst thing to enforce brand consistency/message discipline in a big org, but it was a bit clunky. Every time we tried to fix it, it just got longer. It started at two weeks (I draft the tweet, approved by manager, approve by external partner mentioned in the tweet, and emailed to marketing so they could schedule the tweet in a few business days). But there were too many tweets, so my department designated a liaison to collect the tweets from all our staff, which backed it up a week. Then there were miscommunications between my department liaison and his counterpart in Marketing, so they switched to a bi-weekly meeting, with the request that our pre-approved tweets arrive at least two weeks before they needed to tweet, so we are now drafting said tweets 6-7 weeks in advance so that everyone can lay eyes on the tweet and then make sure that our department liaison could send it to Marketing with enough time to tweet, literally, “Thanks [sponsor] for supporting tonight’s performance of [artist or show name]”. All of this because we could not POSSIBLY consider asking said sponsor to trust us that we, a long-running grantee, can issue a tweet using their (pre-approved) logo and name with the good faith understanding that we will use this basic format of “Thanks, sponsor, for sponsoring this thing you have fudned.” I have worked with this particular sponsor in other, subsequent, jobs and that’s what we did. But no. At this place, we had a seven week tweet approval process.

  206. Office Manager*

    When I first started working where I do, everything was paper based and over the almost-decade I’ve been here I’ve been able to move everything online. Yay!

    There’s this one thing I still use that I just can’t let go of yet. The gal before me used to print out everything she needed to email, then re-scan it and save as a photo to attach… instead of just saving it as a pdf in the first place! So whenever I needed to email something it would come out of a folder labeled “scanned documents”.

    We have since become much more high tech by saving items as a pdf directly… but to this day I still save everything into “scanned documents” so that I can find it. It’s not the most efficient but it’s just muscle memory now so I don’t want to change it until someone replaces me.

  207. DramaQ*

    I worked in a lab for six months that still used Windows 95 and DOS for their testing. They got mad at me because I didn’t know what DOS was.

    I looked at them and said I was 12 the last time I used Windows 95.

    They got quiet after that then finally showed me how to use it.

  208. Peregrinations*

    I worked at a small non-profit in the San Francisco Bay area (tech central!) in the early 2000s, and one of my duties there was internal IT support. We all did a lot of database work, and the database software that we used ran on Windows. Except one of our employees – one of those people who is extremely gifted in one specific niche area, but an absentminded professor type in other arenas – was technology averse. He insisted on working in DOS and wouldn’t budge, so we had to maintain outdated and buggy versions of our software that worked on DOS just for him. I left that office 20 years ago, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still working on a DOS machine!

  209. Pizza Pizza*

    I work in a large team that is entirely remote within a larger organization that is majority in-office. At the beginning of the pandemic, the parent organization launched a daily Google form that asks if you are working remotely or coming into the office or taking PTO. If you were coming into an office, you were asked which location. The reasoning provided was that this was the best way for them to track potential outbreaks and notify others who had been in a building where someone tested positive for COVID. (Because of the area I work in, some jobs had to continue on-site throughout the pandemic.)

    Four years later, we are all still required to do the daily check-in. We have had all-hands about the daily check-in. We have had protests against the daily check-in. We have made memes about the daily check-in. If you fail to fill out the daily check-in, you will get a nastygram from some poor administrative assistant who is tasked with making sure the spreadsheet of responses is complete. Your supervisor will have to add a justification for why you did not fill out the daily check-in. If you do it enough times, you will be chastised about not taking the daily check-in seriously. (Nobody takes the daily check-in seriously.)

    We have asked if our remote workers could please be excused from this madness. We have asked what, if anything, this data could still be useful for, only to be told that the organization “needs” it for unspecified reasons. I guess we’ll be well prepared for the inevitable next global pandemic…

  210. Donn*

    During Covid lockdown, I ended up using vacation and sick time to cover a medical LOA.

    I could have submitted a state disability claim online. But the medical facility would have to enter the medical info part. They wouldn’t deal with that.

    The facility would complete a paper form, for a fee. But my HR dept would have to snail mail me the form. Apparently these forms were individually bar-coded, so not downloadable online.

    This doctor’s great. I also hope I’ll never need their services again. They don’t own the facility, so I ended up never saying anything to them.

  211. Grace*

    We use a in house built access program to voucher our expenses. There is a long drawn out way we have to do it in order to submit it. Irony, bookkeeping doesn’t use it.

  212. Mostly Managing*

    The Closet of Doom.

    I took a new job about 8 months ago and was assigned an office. There’s a wardrobe-type closet in the corner. It’s full of old files and goodness knows what.
    I’m not allowed to purge it in case something in there is useful.
    But nobody knows what’s in there.

    I mostly ignore it.

  213. Frustrated*

    October 17, 2024 at 5:10 pm
    A company that changed settings in SharePoint so the site can’t be shared with anyone outside the org meaning emailing documents. Would have been better if there had been some type of formal request process to add externals.
    Before SharePoint was great ie pretty web page with links, calendar, folders and much more!

  214. Intermittent Introvert*

    Higher Ed Student Services: Every month we had to build a report that counted all the interactions we had with students. I could never get a clear answer on parameters. For example we counted phone calls. Outgoing only, incoming only, both? And did we count leaving a message? The director kept changing the story. Did we count chatting with a student in the hallway? Or just office visits? Anyway. When we got a new director we all dutifully submitted our reports. She knew nothing about them, but submitted them to her immediate VP. He had no idea what they were. He’d never seen them. In other words we had been spending valuable time generating reports that went nowhere.

  215. CosmicKiwi72*

    A company I worked at has a large awards program. Details changed but imagine 1000s of nominations for 200 awards in different categories like “Outstanding Innovation”, “Excellence in Leadership”, “Champion of Customer Needs” that kind of thing. Each nomination ends up as a single row in a spreadsheet. Each row is ~100 columns wide and there are thousands of rows each year. Some cells hold 500+ word nomination justifications. Others included the nominees award history. If an employee is nominated twice, they go into the spreadsheet twice until someone manually combines the nominations.

    Each award category has its own committee that reviews the nominations and selects their winners. This means over 100 people are in a single spreadsheet adding comments, scoring nominations, fixing issues like duplicate nominations. People will sort or filter the sheet and then members of other committees can’t find their nominees and send panicked emails about missing data. There are edits colliding all over the place. It is absolute chaos.

    To deal with the chaos most committees create copies of the spreadsheet for their use. And then ask the program leadership to reconcile them with the main spreadsheet, which is another manual process that takes hours.

    Over the years many people have suggested using one of the many applications that exist for handling this kind of thing. But the award committees always says “its always been done this way” and “none of the software meets our exact needs”.

    So we’re perpetually stuck with a system that no one likes and is prone to errors.

  216. It's Me*

    We were expected to answer Microsoft Team phone calls immediately. No matter what. In a meeting? Doesn’t matter. From an unknown number? Doesn’t matter. I’m not in a phone-dependent role? (If you’re calling me on Teams, you also have the ability to email and IM me.) Doesn’t matter.

    Why? The founder laid down that ethos back in the early 90s. You know, before voicemail or caller ID. Oh, he also sold the company. And died before I ever started. Doesn’t matter.

  217. ashie*

    In 2006 I started at a nonprofit with a board member whose who was involved in computing in the late 1970s and was fully Entrenched. She absolutely refused to allow us to store records in anything other than a DOS database because it was the only software she trusted.

    The company employed a full time person whose job it was to enter (some of) our client data into this dinosaur database on her dinosaur computer. This person was also Entrenched and her data entry was always months behind which meant that anyone who needed a recent file had to dig through her mountain of paperwork as she signed and everyone tut-tutted about how poor Bobbie had such a high workload and how sad there’s nothing that can be done.

  218. Semi-retired admin*

    We had to do yearly reports that required information easily exported from a database. The forms that we had to submit the information on were created by an admin over 25 years ago and NEVER changed. They were fillable electronically, but cumbersome to use, and it involved a combination of retyping and copying and pasting the information. I tried over several years to get the newest admin to create (or let me create for her!) them in excel so we could export directly from the database to the form is one step. Nope. Never happened.

  219. Katie*

    My team completes wire payments. We have to get several levels of approval for these payments, requiring signatures, which is fine BUT it must be a hand printed signature and we all work from home. My team sends it to me, I must print and sign. Then I send yo my boss and she prints and signs. Depending on the amount, she may have to send to her boss who has to print and sign. We then send to another team who has to approve and sign and send to the team who finally does the wire.

    We have begged for it be just an e-signature but nope printed signature only.

    (Shhhh… I may be secretly doing this on my computer)

  220. Software dev*

    I’m a Java developer, and there’s a piece of software called Maven that is essential for many software development teams at our company. It’s very widely used in the industry and most of our Java applications use it, so when new hires are onboarded, they quickly run into the question “how do I install maven?” Our company is in a highly regulated industry and we sometimes work with sensitive data, so the company has strict rules about what software you can install on your computer. You’re only allowed to install apps via the software catalog. This is fine for most software, but Maven is not in the software catalog. Why? Well, what I’ve been told is that if you want a new piece of software to be added to the catalog, you have to take on the responsibility for supporting that software (which involves answering user questions, managing installations/upgrades, etc). And no random developer at the company wants to take on the burden of being the official support person for this piece of software that’s used by thousands of employees, since they were not hired to do IT support. So anyone who does contact our official internal IT support asking about Maven installation will be directed to the Teams channel for developers, who don’t really have an answer for them other than “break company policy”, which everyone is understandably hesitant to say outright on a company Teams channel. As far as I know everyone just downloads it from the Maven website (a violation of company policy) or copies the installation file from someone else on their team (who presumably violated policy when they originally downloaded the file). I doubt whether this will ever get fixed because fixing it would require so, so much more time and effort than quietly continuing to break the policy.

  221. Z*

    My job has a daily automated 6:30am email that must be checked every weekday. If it fails and isn’t fixed by 9am, the customers will see wrong data. Only 4 people look at this daily 6:30am email, and until a month ago, I was one of those 4.

    I checked this stupid 6:30am email every day for the past 6 years since I joined the company, so I’m extremely happy to not have to do it anymore. I am very much not a morning person and was not told about the 6:30am email when I interviewed, so I was pretty upset about it. I have a short commute and had been planning on sleeping until 7:30am every morning for this job since the office hours are 9-5. The 6:30am email can be checked from home, and unless a data failure occurs, we don’t have to do anything until showing up at the office at 9am. Where I live (NYC region) it’s still dark at 6:30am for about half the year, and I hate being required to do work that early even if it’s from home.

    This 6:30am email had a close call about 2 years ago when the data failed and I was the only one to catch it because the other people supposedly checking were either on vacation or online but not paying attention. They thanked me profusely and gave me an end of year performance award, but no changes were made to this system. It’s still only 4 people checking, and no one wants to consider a more modern way to ensure daily data accuracy.

    I don’t know why I’ve been removed from 6:30am email checking. I did bring up concerns with this stupid system years ago, but I haven’t complained recently. I’m guessing they’re planning to have me laid off or fired soon, but I don’t care anymore.

  222. Kali*

    Another government worker chiming in. The list is long, but our most recent one is… timesheets.

    I’m a first responder in a large suburb, so most of our staff does shift work which is *ahem* constantly shifting in hours. Our old timesheet system looked like a 15 year old kid programed it in 1999, but it worked – there was one page where we entered and submitted everything. Supervisors could approve them in huge batches. In the government way of fixing what isn’t broke though, we were forcibly switched to the system that the city at large uses. It is complex, to say the least. Most city workers do a regular 9 to 5 with little to no variation, so they entered their hours once and were good to go for forever.

    Not for us with our wild schedules! There were meetings and training sessions and supervisor-only training sessions and emails before the switch. After the switch to this “new and improved” program, there was – quite simply – mass hysteria. Nothing worked for months. Despite multiple emails with visual aids, no one could figure out how to enter hours, much less anything complicated like *vacation*. I include myself in this – it takes about 7 extra steps than you would anticipate, none of them logical. Supervisors were getting carpal tunnel by having to approve hours day by day and worker by worker. They had to push back the full roll-out twice, because government workers will take a lot of crap, but we won’t put up with the risk of not getting paid. We finally figured most of it out, but we’ve collectively decided to ignore the scheduling portion of the program and use a shareable spreadsheet… like it’s 1999.

  223. Six Feldspar*

    I inherited a multi tab spreadsheet to track monthly data – a little old, a little clunky, but workable.

    Except…

    One of the tabs is set up to list monthly data HORIZONTALLY, year by year. We are currently at column JQ and I’m not sure how much further Excel can expand for this…

    1. Susan Calvin*

      Oof. I can’t *really* be shocked by this, because in my experience A Lot of time series data is arranged along the x-axis (project gantt charts, inventory or production forecasts, etc) but why on earth is everything in one tab?

    2. Hlao-roo*

      I was curious, and a single Excel tab can hold up to 16,384 columns. The last column is XFD, so I wouldn’t be worried about space until you get to column XAA. I would, however, already be annoyed by all the left-right scrolling to be able to view the data in column JQ.

      (If you want to change the setup of that tab, copy all the data in that tab, right click, choose “paste special,” and check the “transpose” box. That will paste the data vertically–data from row 1 will go into column A, data from row 2 will go into column B, etc.)

      2. Six Feldspar*

        Yes I am aware of transpose, fantastic function!

        I tried to rework the white thing last summer and I’ll pick it up the project again this summer when it’s quiet. The issue is that it has to stay in excel and I need to keep it simple enough for someone else to be able to do the work without a huge amount of experience or guidance. The instruction document that came with the spreadsheet was written very clearly with this in mind – even down to explaining how to click and drag a formula…

  224. RJ*

    I worked at a company where, at the suggestion of an employee, they built an in-company social network. Management was obsessed with getting us to use it, but no one ever did. The employee who suggested it died shortly thereafter, and so management’s obsession with us getting to use the in-house social network became even stronger, to the point that they would post work-relevant things in there for the purpose of forcing us to log in.

    For instance, we would get lunch every Friday, and initially what we ate for lunch was decided based on a SurveyMonkey link we were emailed. Easy enough, right? At the height of the mania around the company social network, they stopped sending us the SurveyMonkey link, and would instead email us that it was now posted on the site (but not its location), so everyone would have to go to the company social network, log in to their account, find the lunch survey post, and then finally click to take the survey (which was hosted on SurveyMonkey anyway).

  225. Disappointed Australien*

    We have a single computer running Windows 95 (or WinMe or whatever) because it has the special drivers for the special add-in card that talk to the really old hardware device we use in one step of the production process in the factory.

    It would be very easy to update, we just need to buy the new version of the hardware (~$20,000), buy a new license for the software (~$5,000/year), get one of the programmers to grind through updating the software that’s written in a weird ‘visual programming language’ that no-one has ever used (a month’s work? who knows?)

    So we keep using it and have a plan for what to do when it finally breaks down.

  226. I didn't say banana*

    I worked in a private prison – the government built it in the 90s, then contracted a private company to run and maintain it. The government constantly complained and said they weren’t going to renew the contract, but then would renew it for two more years every time. The private company didn’t want to spend money on upgrades if the contract was actually going to end, so everything in the prison was 30 years old.

    But the worst was the system for staff getting their keys. It was bad enough that it was physical keys loooong after it should have been swipe cards that could track which staff opened which gates. To get into the key room, an officer watching you on security camera had to remotely unlock the door for you. But the non custodial staff didn’t wear uniforms, so they were indistinguishable from any random person off the street who wanted to enter the key room.

    All the key sets were in a locked box, and the key to that box was in a little safe with a 4-digit pin code. The “0” button on the pin code pad was the only number worn down. Literally anyone with an IQ above room temperature would be able to access every single set of keys for this “maximum security” facility.

    Thankfully, the people who eventually broke in and took all the keys didn’t immediately give the keys to the inmates, allowing 1200 offenders to escape. Instead, they took the keys out of the prison and tried to sell them to inmate’s families. Unfortunately for them, their IQ was room temperature on a cold day and they advertised the key sale from their personal Facebook account.

    So, the private company had to pay millions to upgrade every lock in the prison, plus the fines the government hit them with, and the contract was finally not renewed. And some of the people who stole the keys ended up in the same prison, which was more secure thanks to their actions.

  227. Quill*

    A previous boss was too cheap to buy an antivirus subscription.

    We were required to cycle through month long free trials of antivirus for over two years.

  229. OfficeWorker*

    I worked for a place where the accounting department insisted that you provide “original” (a.k.a. paper) invoices and receipts for all purchases. The lore was that this was required by our auditors, which wasn’t true. When I asked the head of the accounting department about this, she told me that when they hadn’t required paper originals, people had sometimes submitted the same invoice multiple times resulting in duplicate payments. Not only does that not explain the requirement about receipts, but it also meant that we were constantly printing “originals” because most of the invoices/receipts were electronic to begin with!!!

    1. Strive to Excel*

      Any reasonably competent accounting system should have an invoice number field in place to prevent this exact issue.

  230. Check writer*

    I finally figured out my example! I work for someplace that is a tiny branch office of a large nonprofit organization; one of my primary responsibilities is to pay the bills. I recently (in the last year) got blowback because I was not paying everything with checks. Our checks are double-signed, which in theory gives us accountability. (We also have other accountability measures such as yearly audits.) This was The One True Way. One issue was autopay; we had some bills that were set up on autopay because in 2024 that’s the only way some businesses will take payment, at least in my area. We also had records of the bills that were autopaid being approved. But if we didn’t have checks, how could we be sure that the payments and services were still approved? Please note that these were things like our phone bill; all of them were regular ongoing bills that are normal costs of business. But still! Why not checks??

    Another issue, and the one where I put my foot down, was the issue of credit card use. We were told that we could not ever use the credit card that we had for anything. While I appreciate the risk of misuse, we keep meticulous records and receipts for everything we spend. But we were still supposed to use checks. One of our major regular expenses (by regular, I mean 2-4 times per year) involves travel for conferences. These conferences involve traveling for a week or so at a time, and with the hotel costs (since the organization is booking at nice, if not 5 star, hotels), flights, etc., were all at least $1000-2000 per person. And airlines and hotels won’t let you make reservations without credit cards these days. So the solution was that we should make all attendees pay for it up front and then we would reimburse them. AAM was a great help to me in this time of need; I declared that I wouldn’t force attendees, many of them volunteers for the organization, to pay thousands of dollars of their own money as a loan to the org. I was told sorrowfully that that was the only option because of the Department of Labor’s rules for our kind of org. Undeterred, I called the DoL and talked with a very nice rep who told me the ACTUAL rules about credit card usage. I then wrote up a policy for our branch of the org regarding credit card usage and such (it stated firmly that we would never force someone to loan the org money for a conference, minus some cases with part of their per diem). Now I still write a ridiculous number of checks for 2024, but at least we can use our credit card. Other branches of said org are still using only checks. For everything.

  231. Cthulhu’s Librarian*

    Warning! The following story has been deemed a cognitohazard for library professionals! Exposure may lead to heads exploding, heart attacks, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and murderous rage!

    … So, in the library in the town where I grew up, there was a locked card catalog built into the wall in the director’s office. This seemed an odd place for the card catalog to be located, but the typical statement given was that it was a historical oddity, and to pay it no mind. It would have been too much trouble to unload it. Besides, no one really knew where the keys were for it. Some day someone might want to look at the old history of our collection, the catalog would be there, waiting! So swore the librarian, who was a social fixture of great importance in this very small town.

    Being a bored and curious young child, I had always wanted to know what was in it. We had another card catalog down where the public could use it (it was the early 90s), so I convinced myself that this catalog must contain something special, to need to be upstairs and locked.

    Eventually, I would be employed as an aide at this library, and I confess I still was curious about the catalog in the director’s office. So, I asked the (new) librarian if I could open it, and she shrugged and said “Sure, whatever. No one ever gave me keys for it when I replaced [Old Librarian] in 2009 though.”

    Not a problem, I said, and aided by a couple of letter openers and a pocket knife, I eventually opened the drawers.

    They contained the historical borrowing cards for every item the library had owned, neatly organized by the library section the book had been part of. None of the patron names had ever been crossed out, and they were all still legible, with due date and return date noted dutifully on them. They spanned from the 1970s to approximately 2008 – each time the borrowing card for a book had been filled, it had been meticulously filed away, and a new one put in that book.

    When had we gotten an electronic library system to be able to check books in and out on a computer and not have to keep track of it on pieces of paper, I imagine some folks are asking? 1993. [Old Librarian] had maintained completely redundant records for approximately 15 YEARS, hand filling out the cards after checking books out on the new system, and functionally no one had known. In and of itself, that’s a bit mindboggling.

    But remember how I said this catalog was organized by what section of the library the books had been kept in? Well, [Old Librarian] had strong notions of Propriety, and so these borrowing cards were organized into her traditional book categories of Children’s Material, Fiction, Marital Issues, Non-Fiction, Periodicals, Perversions, Youths, and Women’s Health (Dewey Decimal order, of course, within each shelving section).

    “We should probably get rid of these, right?” I said to [New Librarian]. “I thought we weren’t supposed to keep records of what people checked out. That whole patron privacy thing you lectured me about on my first day.”

    “We’ll have to have them securely destroyed.” [New Librarian] mused. “I don’t think we’ve got the budget for it. Can you relock the cabinet?”

    I could not. And so after talking with the town maintenance guy, a set of iron bands were bolted to the wall and secured with padlocks to keep the drawers closed and information secure.

    And… that’s the end of the story, as best I know it. In the time I worked at that library, the funds never appeared to get the cards destroyed securely.

  232. 3 Google Sheets to the wind*

    *cracks knuckles* this is my time!

    We have a large but not huge database of contacts. These are kept in an Excel Sheet native to a desktop in the home office of an employee.
    *However* this document needs copious and constant updates throughout the year, mostly done by Not That Employee.
    The Excel Sheet is set up as 4 individual tabs of one category each, and a fifth tab combining all the categories.
    The result is that any change needs to be made identically in two different places within the doc. Which is easy to skip. And then any time the doc is updated, it must be emailed back to its home, and all older iterations must be deleted from other locations.
    So if two people think they are working on the newest list in different locations, they are making separate and largely untrackable edits that must be manually matched up, or dumped together and deduped.
    If the doc crashes and gets recovered and saved improperly, there are suddenly two with slightly different edits with comparable save times.
    If someone forgets to edit in both tabs, it is largely impossible to find and fix.
    Begging and pleading to switch to Google Sheets has finally started to yield some glimmers of hope. The idea to drop the large combined tab and simply reassemble it on the rare occasions it is necessary has some promise to it.

    As an added bonus, many folks are listed twice because they are a) listed in two separate tabs b) listed with and without a spouse or c) other reasons(?!???).

    Years of reporting difficulties with this doc have been brushed off, and many a conversation has happened with the gist of “well it’s not a problem with the doc, it’s human error.” To which I have finally replied that the doc is especially prone to human error and human error IS the complication I’m looking to solve.

    There is more. There is so much more. But that is the current priority.

  233. Compliance is fun*

    Earlier this year I got a job in admin at a small financial management company. They actually created the job for me based on my skill set that they recognised when I applied for a different role. They told me that my job would be to help them improve their systems – both technology-wise and general processes. When I got there I realised why they wanted me for this – their CRM was barely used, and the main way they stored information was through uploading documents emails sent to and from the client to the system. The system allowed us to categorise those uploads, but no one ever did. The only way to find information about the client (e.g. what accounts we manage, previous actions done on those accounts, etc.) was to trawl through those documents and hope they were correctly named and hope you’re not missing anything.

    When I suggested we record everyone’s managed accounts in the system, they freaked out and said what if we miss one.

    When I made it possible to send emails (including using templates) from the system, they freaked out, saying that because we are a “personalised service” we couldn’t possibly send emails made from templates – even though the current process was to find a previous email sent to a different client and change the details. They also objected to the system autofilling their preferred name into the email because “what if their preferred name is just a nickname and it’s unprofessional to use it? But also what if their preferred name is the name they always use so they would be upset if we use their legal name in general correspondence?” To which my response was “Why would they give us a preferred name that they didn’t want us to use?” To which their response was “You just have to get to know our clients better on a more personal level.”

    But their hpmost infuriating refusal to change was that every 6-12 months the adviser would review the clients’ portfolio. Of course, since their portfolio wasn’t easy to view at a glance, the administrators needed to gather all those pieces of disparate information and plop it in a Word document, which took about 45 mins to complete, when the system they used easily could have spit it out within minutes. When it became obvious that the person who got the job I applied for (“Laura”) was not going to be able to do that process, they asked me to help with it. I told them “I don’t really want to do it the way it is, so I’ll do it until I can find a way to improve the system.” Again, all my suggestions at improving were rebuffed, and when they fired Laura they gave me that role permanently, with no acknowledgement that I’d indicated that the process was a trashfire. That was the minute I started looking for a new job.

  234. Chatte_en_Fer*

    I work for a very large, international company that has a presence on almost every continent. They essentially make “science things” of various kinds across multiple industries. Their main ordering system? A bespoke DOS based program that has to be run on an emulator because no Microsoft OS has been able to naturally run DOS since XP at the latest, and probably not well at that.

    I can only imagine the amount of work taken up to keep this ancient system alive, and make sure it keeps running because entire new security systems have been invented since its inception. They are finally phasing it out, but I have yet to find a legitimate reason why they won’t let this dinosaur of a software die. Everything from “it’s more stable” (it’s not and often crashes when the VPN gets briefly disconnected) to “it’s more resistant to hacking” (I imagine only because most non-specific malware isn’t built for it, not because it is actually difficult to do).

    I can understand smaller businesses keeping their industry specific programs alive for long stretches due to cost, but this is a company who boasts about yearly profit in “B for Billions”. It’s a pain to use, comes with a steep learning curve, and is further complicated because the training modules don’t apply to the latest version of the emulator they had to use for Windows 11. *Sigh*

  235. from the field a symphony*

    Lot of librarians chiming in with their stories, here’s mine.

    The library where I used to work had a rule that we couldn’t dispose of paper records for 5 years. Somehow this translated into ALL paper records, including children’s summer reading logs. They took up a large filing cabinet in my office. I chucked all that crap into the dumpster. And if The State Library Police ever came to conduct an audit to see whether kids really did read everything they said they did during the summer of 2011, well– I have no idea, since I left that nonsense a long time ago.

  236. Filofaxes*

    So much of healthcare. It’s frightening how much of healthcare (especially hospitals) are literally trapped by ancient, obscure, *finicky* systems that were invented and previously maintained by someone who retired (or died) years ago and all the current employees don’t know enough about the system to really upgrade or replace it. And replacing it is too expensive anyway, especially in any way that won’t negatively bring the whole system down.

    Healthcare is also still really, really enslaved to (redacted) fax machines, oh my god. It is always 1985 in some parts of healthcare. I work in an area adjacent to the industry and had someone call the other day about wanting to fax us something. We have no actual fax machines, no way of receiving physical faxes (probably since at least 2017). I offered to help with receiving it by email or such but that wasn’t acceptable apparently. Well sorry not sorry but it is almost 20-goddamn-25, we came out of a pandemic that turned many companies virtual, and traditional faxing is a useless waffle iron with a telephone attached to it. If your office can’t figure out how to get something to me outside of faxing it, then it must not be that important. You’d honestly be better off using Pony Express.

  237. FunTimes*

    I work in a lab testing samples in a US city. These samples originate from labs 20 ft from where I work. Instead of being handed directly to me for testing, the samples are first shipped to Germany for processing into inventory and then shipped back for testing. This delays sample results by a few weeks and costs several thousand in shipping, but apparently it’s cheaper than establishing the inventory system in our building.

    1. Margaret Cavendish*

      Wow, I think this one deserves a prize of some sort. That is a truly impressive amount of bureaucracy!

    2. Enough*

      Sounds like the post office. At one time mail going to and from addresses in my postal zone would stay at my post office and get delivered some times the same day. Lasted a few years bu has since gone back to sending them to a regional post office where everything seems to take no less than 3 days.

  238. Owlette*

    My old job had literal whiteboards on the door of the meeting rooms. The pushback when managers tried to change to Outlook bookings was intense. I was by far the youngest on the team (late 20s) but had been using Outlook calendars for many years. I tried to quietly explain functionality to back up the managers (ability to book recurring blocks! Not having to walk between multiple offices and the calendar to schedule a meeting!) but it still took weeks of it being a standing item in meetings to get it going (and the whiteboard never fully disappeared)

  239. Tweet Approver*

    Second one, because oh does this still haunt me every October.

    I worked for a nonprofit that had a habit of merging with/absorbing other dying nonprofits in the same field. Nice of them to take up projects that were mission-related, but sometimes orgs fail because your core business model doesn’t work and our unwillingness to change anything once we merged led to some problems. One I was directly in charge of: we had two major fundraising galas in per year. They were both black-tie seated dinners in the same city (we were a national org) October. I asked my boss (the Director of Development) she said she had tried but it was out of her control. I asked the two different programming areas who were the beneficiaries for each gala and they said it was absolutely imperative that we continue doing this for each of their programs in exactly this same way; we could not possibly consider changing format or locations or, maybe, the month in which the activities took place. Finally there was some sort of broader org culture discontent and the CEO scheduled 1:1 meetings with every single employee and when my turn came around I gently pointed out that I had been doing some market analysis and surveys of our donors and calculations on both events (minimal) ROI and I just couldn’t make sense of why it was like this. I asked if he could help me understand why this was so important that we kept our two galas in the same month. His answer? Well, we’ve always done it that way. (He no longer works there. That org now has zero black-tie seated dinner galas in October).

  240. Percy Weasley*

    This happened in a government job: Even as late as 2020 & 2021, the department still received paper documents accompanied by checks. During the busy season, a daily deposit might have a few hundred checks, most for the same amounts, say $25 & $75. We were required to submit with the checks & deposit paperwork not one but TWO adding machine tapes showing that the checks added up to the deposit amount. Making an error in the tape (like losing track of how many times I’d hit the + key after entering an amount) and having to start over again SUCKED! I never asked why it was necessary to print TWO adding machine tapes because I was afraid the answer would be stupid and you would have seen me on the news “Gov’t Employee Throws Adding Machine Through Window”.

    1. Enough*

      You need two to show that you got the total correct. I had to do this with the bank deposit for a retail store in 1982.

  241. Hydrangea MacDuff*

    My hourly team in a branch office had to fill out paper timesheets and fax them weekly. We didn’t have a time clock and no one had to approve them. The five of us who worked in that office just sent them in to payroll. Our manager was largely absent and we could have put any damn thing on those cards that we wanted (mine were pretty accurate but my colleagues in Terrible Office did not have the same adherence to rule following, shall we say.) After I relocated offices from the US to British Columbia, I was the only person in the office who got paid by the US side of the company so I still had to dutifully fax my weekly timesheet, which could have been complete and utter fiction because no one was checking on me at all. On the one hand it didn’t bug me because I was rule follower (see above) and at least I got overtime when applicable. I also learned how to build a snazzy little spreadsheet that calculated my hours and PTO balance that I would print off each week.

  242. MigraineMonth*

    When I had been at my job about a year, I was doing requirements gathering for a payments processing system, and I discovered one of our workers was doing the following workflow: Every Monday (including holidays/vacation/sick days) except for the Monday before the second Tuesday of the month, she would log into the central system and indicate that all of the payments scheduled for the week should be deferred a week unless there was an exception and we decided to process that payee’s payment early. I asked her why we didn’t just let the system automatically process the payments each week, and she didn’t know.

    I sent an email to someone the accounting office asking why we only sent out payments once a month and suggested instead letting the system send out the direct-deposit payments each week. It seemed like a win-win to simplify on our end and get the payees their money faster. They replied, cc’ing their manager and mine, asking why we’d unilaterally decided to make this disruptive change. Within minutes their manager replied to that one, cc’ing their manager and the program director, wondering why they hadn’t been consulted. While I was drafting a response, the program director sent an email to all and sundry, including if I recall correctly the heads of both our departments, demanding to know who had approved this change.

    Fortunately I was able to head it off there with a clarification/apology email to a cross-section of the leadership of two departments. I called my manager to explain what had happened, and they said, “I don’t know why, but people in this organization escalate possible changes really high, really quickly.” It’s been four years since then, and I still channel all my process suggestions through my manager.

  243. Anax*

    California state HR processes, honestly. I have former coworkers involved in digitizing these – because in 2024, most of them are still done on paper.

    But… apparently, HR insists that EVERYTHING must be maintained. Even things that make no sense in a digital form, like “a field to write the person’s name at the top of each page, in case the form pages get separated”, or “a form which exists solely to forward information from one group to another, which could be done automatically through an email CC or automatic ticketing software.”

    Every field, every form, every process. And there are about 2400 forms.

    Nightmarish.

  244. Uketamawarimashita!*

    I live and work in Japan. A couple of years ago (so, the 2020s), I worked for a parts distributor.

    We received and acknowledged all orders by fax. Yep, some of those things you hear about Japanese companies and their steadfast refusal to ditch fax machines are true!

    Customers would call or email us to check if we had something in stock, how much it cost, how long it’d take for delivery – all of which we could confirm on our shared spreadsheets, or by taking a quick look at the inventory on the office shelves. We’d either tell them over the phone or reply by email. They would then fax us their order.

    We had to: print out the order sheet(s), cross out the honorific after our company name in every instance, write in any corrections (if they’d gotten a part number or price wrong), write in the honorific after the client’s name in every instance, write ‘order received with thanks’ in a blank space on the page, add the company stamp at the top and write in the order received date, put your own name stamp next to ‘order received’ and next to any/all corrections made (yes, you also needed a name stamp so they knew who’d handled the order), and fax it back.

    The fax machine was the sole reason none of us were allowed to work from home. This was at the height of the Covid pandemic, and during several states of emergency announced by the Japanese government.

    I couldn’t get a straight answer as to why on earth we still used it. I couldn’t get them to change – it was a ‘this is the way things work around here’ kind of stance. (As many things in Japan are, something I know after nearly a decade here.)

    I was already the one who’d implemented the shared file system during my first month, after finding out that people were constantly saving new versions with the date (and time!) at the end of the file name and emailing them around. Trying to also convince them to ditch the fax machine was a non-starter, so I let it go.

    I left after nearly 2 years to move into a different industry, and that was more than a year ago. I just took a look, and the fax number’s still on the company website.

  245. Azure Jane Lunatic*

    This is not my story, but I think it deserves mentioning for the brave souls reading all the comments: the time the new acquisition’s app’s production database, with sensitive customer information, was hosted in Dropbox. The full story is on Reddit, link forthcoming forthwith.

  247. Queen Avocado Delilah*

    Not exactly a terrible system but definitely one to which people were bizarrely attached: at Old Job, we were 4 teams of about 6 people each, plus a couple of additional support roles, in a large office space with 6 desk ‘clumps’. I started there in 2016 and was shown to my desk in my team’s clump. In about 2018, management decided that we should change which teams sit at which clump.

    Cue the madness.

    Senior management spent hours locked in a large meeting room, pushing pins around floorplans. During lunch break, people talked of little else but which team would go at which clump. Proposals were sent up to our regional head office and then came back down to us with annotations. All this to swap 4 teams over 6 desk clumps.

    When the Great Desk Moving Day arrived, we all came in, sat down at our new desks, and realised that…nothing was different. Same office, different clump.

  248. Wolf*

    Commenters from government or academia will enjoy this one.

    I once “inherited” an unused office in academia. Office space was limited, so “just clean it out and you can have the room” sounded like a good deal.

    I got granted the budget for one bulk trash container.

    I removed from said office: 23 wobbly/broken chairs. 5 broken desks. 12 years worth of various monthly pharmaceutical magazines. 3 broken printers. 2 rusty coffee makers. 3 doors that belonged to no known room. 6 wonky bookshelves and a random selection of bookshelf sides and doors. 4 unopened book deliveries from 1983 to 1985 (the books were irrelevant due to age). 2 dead plants. And an utterly insane amount of used cardboard boxes, some with crumbled styrofoam inside.

    All of this had been kept “just in case”. Some of it for decades.

    So, if your boss asks you to keep something just in case we might need it again: you will not need that again. If it is useless today, it will not magically stop being useless in ten years. Recycle it today.

  249. dogwoodblossom*

    I worked for a company that made safety equipment for teapot factories. Our systems would monitor teapots for signs of imminent explosion and then auto shut down the teapot line. This equipment was literally saving lives in teapot factories across the country.

    The thing was, the company had been selling these systems since the 80s and there were dozens of models and add-ons and we regularly serviced them and sold replacement parts and that sort of thing. Information about what kind of system a factory had and when it was last serviced was critical information. Sometimes we’d get calls from a factory with a stopped line and we’d need to put our hands on their information as quickly as possible.

    How was that info stored? Why in 3 ring binders of course. We had shelves and shelves of 3 ring binders with the names on all our clients on them and inside would be a blue print of their original system plus all the receipts and service records from sometimes decades of work with us. A lot of this was on old school carbon copies, which fun fact, get sticky after 30 years. Also some of these clients were big enough they’d have two or 3 big binders. Another fun fact, when you have a ton of binders jammed on a shelf sometimes their wedge shape will push others back completely out of site.

    We often would just lose these binders. I was tasked with their maintenance and did tons of research about digitizing them but that suggestion infuriated everyone at this company. Digital records were unreliable but “paper is patient.” Meanwhile we sometimes had to get very old records out of deep storage in a place with a mold problem.

    Did I mention accessing this stuff quickly was sometimes a literal life and death issue? The head office eventually ended up shutting us down and I was honestly relieved to be laid off.

  250. Someone*

    Nothing in my personal experience, but the most tragic example would be the Horizon system in the UK Post Office.

    This software was obviously flawed since there were many reports of it creating accounting shortfalls, but, yet the Post Office chose to protect its precious system instead of fixing it.

    To quote Computer Weekly:
    “But problems ensued, and there was a sudden increase in the number of subpostmasters suffering unexplained accounting shortfalls. Rather than investigate the problems and fix them, the Post Office blamed the branch operators, many of whom it prosecuted for financial crimes, with many more made bankrupt and sacked.”

    “Hundreds were made bankrupt, losing their livelihood, and many struggled after being forced to pay the Post Office to cover shortfalls that didn’t exist outside the Horizon system. The lives of the victims and their families were severely impacted, with several suicides linked to the scandal and many cases of illness caused by stress.”

    “The Post Office was determined to keep a lid on the Horizon problems. To do this, it instructed staff in its call centre, which was the first contact point for subpostmasters having problems, to tell callers they were the only ones experiencing problems.”

    1. WheresMyPen*

      Every time I read more about the Horizon scandal I get more and more angry. For anyone who can access it, give Mr Bates vs the Post Office a watch. It’s horrendous and illuminating.

      1. Hedwig*

        It’s such an awful story and incredibly, still ongoing. There’s also ‘The great post office trial’ podcast, which was released in 2020

  251. Keymaster of Gozer (She/Her)*

    A former job of mine was supporting any and all databases in the company.

    There were at the last count over 2,500 user created Access databases that after a corporate decision meant I was to keep running. Many of them did the exact same thing. All were badly coded.

    Seeing that a lot of them were for room booking systems I actually created a working centralised one that had the right access. The sheer amount of complaints I got from people suddenly unable to do things like delete each other’s bookings or double book a room or having the audacity to ‘touch their system’ was astronomical.

    Management reverted back to their databases. I had a lot of grey hairs when I left that job.

  252. DogRiverFunDays*

    In my job, we frequently have to find old building plans in different parts of the country. One city did a fantastic job digitising their catalogue of – presumably – index cards into a computer programme. The problem is, they did it in I don’t know, 1990? and haven’t updated it since. The computer programme is so old you can’t even use a mouse with it, it’s all ‘press A to view this record’, and the entire screen is blue. Now, inevitably, it’s down, and we literally cannot do our job properly in that city because of it. In the city where we’re based, they never bothered to digitise anything, and although some of the index cards are getting a bit fragile after 150+ years, they’re holding up a lot better than this 30-year-old bit of software (although I do prefer going to the other city’s library because it has the most incredible vintage carpeting).

  253. Loki*

    When I was a student ca 201X, I did data filing in our Examination Office. (I don’t know the US-American equivalent. It is the office that handles permits for examination accommodations, recognition of credits when you are coming in from abroad, etc. A lot of student data, but usually, you will have like one or two documents per student, and none for a lot of them.)

    The files were filed in physical boxes. They were, mercifully, sorted. By the third letter of the surname of the student. Which in practice meant a lot of exceptions, because we would also have a lot of students with Asian two-letter names (think Hu) or cases where the third letter would be something like the h of a sh or ch (Ashfield, Aching).

    See, the professor who had been in charge of the Examination Office several years prior had done some analysis on the distribution of letters in names and had figured out that this way, we would have a more even distribution (i.e. you wouldn’t have nine boxes starting with S and one starting with Y, but instead roughly the same number of boxes per letter).

    Of course, one you have such a system in place, you would need to re-file every file if you want to go to the normal system. So of course it never got done.

    It should not be surprising, at this point, that this was the faculty of Computer Science.

    2. Margaret Cavendish*

      By the…THIRD…what??? Like, that’s cool that you have a more even distribution of boxes, I guess, but didn’t you also need to…you know, *find* things? The mind boggles.

  254. WheresMyPen*

    I work for company that produces educational materials. We had an online learning platform with quizzes that teachers could assign to students that was built in 2010 and used Flash. I joined the company in 2019 and was told then that the platform was old, clunky, a pain in the bum to use and was on its way out. But we continued with it because teachers really liked it and still used the decade-old activities, and no one had the time or money to come up with something better. Every now and then a meeting would be organised to talk about replacement options, but nothing ever moved forward. When Flash died they even built a convoluted workaround involving remote desktops that meant the activities took even longer to build. Once or twice that workaround stopped working and we dared to hope that might be it, but no, they found ways to workaround the workaround. Eventually, four years after I started, higher-ups realised it didn’t comply with data collection and storage, so we had to go in and retrospectively delete a bunch of question types. Finally, we were given the go-ahead to move to a new system! Hurrah! My colleague and I couldn’t quite believe it was really going, and were suspicious right up until it was finally turned off. My old manager had left two years before, but when she heard it was gone she emailed to congratulate us on finally being rid of it. Think we all toasted its demise that evening :D

  255. WheresMyPen?*

    I work for company that produces educational materials. We had an online learning platform with quizzes that teachers could assign to students that was built in 2010 and used Flash. I joined the company in 2019 and was told then that the platform was old, clunky, a pain in the bum to use and was on its way out. But we continued with it because teachers really liked it and still used the decade-old activities, and no one had the time or money to come up with something better. Every now and then a meeting would be organised to talk about replacement options, but nothing ever moved forward. When Flash died they even built a convoluted workaround involving remote desktops that meant the activities took even longer to build. Once or twice that workaround stopped working and we dared to hope that might be it, but no, they found ways to workaround the workaround. Eventually, four years after I started, higher-ups realised it didn’t comply with data collection and storage, so we had to go in and retrospectively delete a bunch of question types. Finally, we were given the go-ahead to move to a new system! Hurrah! My colleague and I couldn’t quite believe it was really going, and were suspicious right up until it was finally turned off. My old manager had left two years before, but when she heard it was gone she emailed to congratulate us on finally being rid of it. Think we all toasted its demise that evening :D

  256. Lemondrop*

    My workplace has a number of very similar sounding departments that do completely different things. My team often gets emails meant for other teams and I’ve spoken to coworkers in other areas who have openly told me they don’t know when to email which team. (We are all remote, so it’s almost always email.)

    I mentioned it to my boss. My previous job had a master list available to the whole company. “If your question is about A, B, or C, email Team 1. If your question is about X, Y, or Z, email Team 2” and so on.

    My boss told me “yeah, I’d love to do something like that! [Great-grandboss] and I tried it before. Several other departments demanded to be removed from the list, so it fell apart.”

    Since when is “no, I refuse to be emailed. no one may contact me.” a valid option??

  257. EvilQueenRegina*

    At Old Job, we used to maintain a list of approved contractors which we could send to people, or appoint the contractors ourselves, to carry out home adaptations. Someone set up a filing system for them…under their insurance expiry date.

    When she went off sick, one of the managers asked someone to change it to alphabetical order so that people might stand a chance of actually finding a particular contractor’s record. She was not happy.

  258. redwitsch*

    First story. When I worked in company, which was selling goods to DIY stores, we got all our our orders, reclamations by fax from stores – in 2015 and retyped them to computer etc. I had to learn use fax. But weirdly during my 8 years in that company, they were able to go from fax to orders in emails and then orders in EDI format, so last two years there I just clicked button and all orders from them went straight to our system. Second story. When we were remodeling and I had to move all our things to temporary office, I found a lot of floppy discs, not working printers, obsolete printers etc. Because I was only one moving whole office (small stuff, furniture moved by our warehouse people, other people in office sick or on vacation) and I had only week, I throw out everything to dumpsters, because no one touched it in last 15 years. Also archiving was not done last 20 years, so we had rows of old papers no longer relevant, I just moved them to spare room and when I had time I went file by file and lets say 80% of stuff from year 20-10 I scarted and rest archived. I aso started archiving old year every February in new year, so that I dont have to go through it again. Third story. We were moving from one CRM system to another, but first two years we still needed to look in old system, because history was not transferable and only computer which was able to work with old system and new system was my PC (small company – only 6 people worked in office), because I had oldest computer and only one still with Windows 7 in era of Windows 10, so that was fun, because I had to proccess like 95% of orders thank to it.

  259. HSE Compliance*

    My previous workplace had a CMS (continuous monitoring system) for environmental compliance. This is a well established piece of compliance regulation, with a metric ton of options out there as far as software goes. Generally, it communicates between sensors and database along with an alarm function with notification out.

    The team INSISTED on using this archaic, literally built in Windows 97, homegrown from a “contractor” who refused to give any detail on how it worked and would not allow anyone else to touch the stupid thing. Usually from CMSes you can pull data reports, because, you know, you kind of need to for compliance. For this system, I had to email the guy at least 3 times (because he’d forget) – never call, he didn’t have a phone he wanted to share – and he’d get around to sending me the compliance data. The data that my company owned. We were also paying north of 5 figures a month for this software/access/”support”. But this contractor had the team (incl. the management team) convinced that if we were to look sideways at the data/system, we would be in a world of EPA hurt. We weren’t even “allowed” to update the operating system on the computer that this worked off of (onsite). IT folks can probably imagine how very, very annoyed our IT staff were getting from system security risks.

    Unluckily enough for him, when I started, I had already used/developed/implemented several CMS as well as having been the actual regulatory inspector. That is no longer one of that company’s contracts. I pulled in our IT team to help and a new system was developed in about 6 months, internally controlled and externally validated/calibrated. You can pull a report with the click of two entire buttons and get the data immediately. Said contractor emailed me (and everyone else at random) for weeks after we cut him off telling us that the EPA was going to shut us down. Fun fact – that never happened.

  260. Didi*

    In 2018-2019, I wanted to take a few college courses and looked into my company’s tuition reimbursement. The reimbursement system required paper forms from managers and other documentation (such as course catalogs) on paper to get approval of the expense, and another set of paper forms upon completion of the class, complete with sign-off from managers and a paper copy of the official transcript showing that we had earned a satisfactory grade on the class.

    My first-line manager was in the UK. His manager (my grandboss) was on the West Coast. I was on the East Coast. I assumed I could send a digital copy to these managers, print, consolidate and send on the the HR person for approval.

    Nope.

    The managers and myself had to sign the same piece of paper. So I printed out the form, signed it, sent it via interoffice mail to the UK manager, who then sent it back to me via interoffice mail, so I could then send it on to the West Coast manager, who then sent it back to me via interoffice mail.

    The mailroom would lump together all the interoffice mail envelopes into one FedEx box to send to the appropriate office. Since interoffice mail was used so infrequently, often my form was the only thing in a giant FedEx box. Altogether, each form probably cost the company $200 to mail around each time. Also, official paper transcripts were like $20 each time and took weeks to arrive.

    Altogether, I spent two months of mailing, chasing, printing and waiting each time. And then the HR person rejected the tuition reimbursement because it was supposed to be filed within 60 days of course completion.

    I concluded that the company just didn’t want to reimburse tuition for anyone. So it became a mission for me to get reimbursed. I finally got my grandboss to call the head of HR’s Learning and Development division with this issue. They were both senior execs at the company. I was not invited to this meeting, but I can only imagine what was said, because I got reimbursed in my next paycheck.

    The process still hadn’t changed a few years later, when I became the manager of the department.

  261. Rock*

    We had these hanging baskets with live plants in them hanging from the ceiling of the restaurant i worked at. These things got full afternoon sun and would be dead not even halfway through the summer because they were 10 ft. off the ground. One time (one time!) I took pity on them and watered them. Manager saw me, and suddenly it’s my job to water the plants.

    Problem is, in order for me to water the plants, I had to stand on a barstool on an uneven floor and hold the watering can above my head. It would take two whole cans to water all the plants and there were multiple baskets, so I had to climb up and down multiple times. I had multiple close calls and did ask if we had a ladder, but we could only find the kind that leaned against something so I couldn’t use it.
    One day, the inevitable happened: I got onto the barstool, lifted the watering can up to water the first plant, and fell. The barstool flew out from under me, so I dropped straight down and landed on my feet, but I nearly gave the bartender a heart attack and he insisted on spotting me every time after that.
    Miraculously a usable ladder was found a week or two later and even though it was a pain to set up, I used that instead of the barstool because watering the flowers was still my job.

  262. Religious Nutter*

    Financial cores. I work in banking and if you knew how absolutely horrid the software that keeps your accounts is, you’d stuff all your money under a mattress and never look back.

    Our company was using one of the major cores, they’d been using it for years, but due to staff turnover, no one knew how to interact with it. No one knew their own jobs. You’d have people in Mortgage Processing who would tell you (with a straight face!) that their job was to “Click this button, then this button, then put numbers here, then click this button.”

    What’s that do? They had no clue!

    So management finally decides that the situation is untenable and needs to be resolved. Our options? Retrain all the staff on the current software, or undertake the herculean effort of switching financial cores. Training would’ve been the smart move, but this is VPs we’re talking about here. Someone said “Bold new direction” and they lost all capacity for rational thought.

    So we switched cores.

    On the upside, everyone was _forced_ to learn their own jobs and also _forced_ to learn how to do that job on a new platform. They could no longer “click here” and check out.

    On the downside? The new core is a mess. Nothing works right. Security is a joke. It’s IT infrastructure is an embarrassment…

    And upper management signed a 10 year contract.

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.

  263. Contracts Killer*

    State government (of course!) legislative services agency decided in the ’00s that Word Perfect was the best way to file legislative changes. I remember being a legal intern in 2004 who had never even heard of Word Perfect and asking about a dusty old computer in the corner of our agency office. That was the “rulemaking” computer. There was one old software version of Microsoft Word that would downgrade a file from Word to Word Perfect, so we kept this old machine with this old version of Word and its only function was to convert our Word files when we had rulemakings that had to be sent to legislative services. As of 2007, it was still being used.

  264. Marie*

    About 15 years ago, I worked in a small county government department that used a custom database designed by a one-man shop. He happily made small tweaks as needed until he died, whereupon his kids sold his business to a corporation. Corporate quickly implemented an astronomical subscription and IT support fee for ANY modifications, which none of the counties who used this database had funds to pay for (subscription models were unheard of then, and nobody budgeted for recurring IT costs). So over the years, pieces of it just broke and everybody worked around them.

    I made an Access database that addressed some of those broken bits. It was an amateur database full of flaws, but it worked well for the 5 people who used it for some very specific in-house tasks.

    I need you to understand how specific this database was. It had button labels like, “Jane press this to get your report” because Jane got confused easily. And sections that said “Joe Do Not Touch This” because Joe always entered data in the wrong place. There were duplicate reports using the color scheme that Amy liked best because otherwise she wouldn’t use it, all titled some version of Amy Use These Reports (they’re green). There were buttons that displayed inside jokes when you pressed them. And no documentation of any kind, because a bored 20-something admin made it for fun.

    A few years ago, I ran into somebody at a similar department in a different county. They were complaining about the terrible database they had to use, and I slowly realized they were talking about MY database. Turns out, my former manager completely misunderstood, well, everything. Staff were singing the praises of my database and how it fixed the problems of the corporate one. So she told other counties she had a free replacement for the corporate database. All the county managers just emailed this database around and forced their staff to use it for the next 15 years. They may still be using it.

  265. WillowSunstar*

    Current job has a 30+ year-0ld mainframe database for everything (think DOS or UNIX). There have been a few attempts at graphic overlays, but usually there are some things that have to be done in the database and can’t be done using the overlay programs. But we’re now being laid off and our jobs outsourced to another country, so maybe that will change for the people who are still going to be there.

  266. Whatchamcallit*

    My first ever job. It was in retail and I was in high school. The owner of the store did NOT know how to use a computer and claimed she was too old to learn. (This was 2008. Computers were not new. Both my parents are older than her and very capably used computers. She was in her 40s. Also, her mother in her 80s used the computer.) Store did not even have internet. E V E R Y T H I N G was on paper. Handwritten receipts. Filing cabinets full of customer appraisals going back to the 80s, the oldest obviously written on a typewriter on carbon copy paper. To update an appraisal, I had to re-type the entire thing in Word with the added updates, because we did not save digital copies of them anywhere. They then got printed so we could put one in the filing cabinet and give one to the customer. One of the “slow day” tasks was to go through the folders on folders and make sure everything was properly alphabetized. One time the owner asked me to look up a phone number and told me grab the phone book. I said I was just going to google it. She asked “Oh, is it because you don’t know how to use a phone book?” Yes, I know the ALPHABET, thank you. Inventory? Physical binders, marked on graph paper by hand to keep track. Even the price tags were handwritten. There are definitely a thousand things I’m leaving out but I don’t know how I didn’t go insane.

  267. Matth3w2*

    Can’t help but notice how many of these comments are about database systems.

    I work for a large funding organization with BILLIONS of dollars in assets. We have many thousands of clients and contributors, and many thousands of organizations (including nonprofits, state and federal agencies, etc) and community leaders that we maintain complex, involved relationships with.

    Our database, unfortunately, is just some random accounting software. It is nothing more than a way to track money. It is not a customer relations management system. But we’ve been using it as one for close to twenty years.

    Many people will understand, without me going into great detail, how difficult it is to run an organization like this without having a proper CRM database. We have built extensive structures on top of and around the database to make it work for our needs. We build an entire bespoke client-facing system that the clients absolutely HATE because – again – it is created from the bones of an inappropriate database. Every single day, multiple processes go wrong and multiple clients or agency partners are angered because of database problems.

    Only in the past year have we begun a serious conversation about a database conversion, and we’ve already run through two consulting firms that are supposed to be advising us.

    I suspect, but don’t know for sure, that the consultants fired us rather than the other way around.

  268. Casey*

    I work at an aerospace company and my specific job is running analyses that get sent to other aerospace companies. The results of the analyses are basically just tables of numbers, which we are happy to provide in several different common formats. Most people are fine with csv… but SOME of our customers have clearly not updated their documentation in a very long time, because I have gotten asked to:

    – Mail them CD-ROMs of data
    – Mail them disks of data
    – Print out the data to a spreadsheet and then fax them the spreadsheet
    – Deliver hard copies in a manila folder by certified mail only

  269. AmusedBouche*

    I was a bookkeeper working with an already outdated version of desktop accounting software in the office, which was not my choice. This was software that came out with a new version annually and offered an online version that was always up-to-date, but instead of enjoying the benefits of that we were using a desktop version about 4 years old. My boss did not like change or handle it well, so he was firmly against updating anything until we absolutely had to.

    Whenever we opened the software it would auto check for updates. Not to a new upgraded version, just the typical and frequent security patches, bug fixes, etc. Somehow my boss figured out that the next update installed would force the user to create a password and actually log in to the software (which we had not been using) and change the password every 90 – can you imagine?! On accounting software? The horror! He demanded from then on that whenever we opened the software, we MUST hit Cancel instead of Accept the updates. Fully understanding that we should be using and changing passwords, I tried to convince him otherwise on multiple occasions, but he was dead set against it. We rejected updates for a full 2 years.

    Because my boss preferred to handwrite checks instead of printing from the system, and record payroll with an entry for each person rather than by dept, I performed a lot of data entry to log all transactions. This was not a great use of my skills, but I picked my battles there and it was an easy task for me, so I didn’t object. One day after returning from a long vacation I hit Enter too fast and accidentally accepted the updates to the software. With no option to undo, I created a password I knew my boss would approve of, and went ahead and completed an entire day’s worth of work recording a large backlog of transactions.

    The next day my boss was understanding about the error (we had hit Cancel probably a thousand times, eventually we were bound to slip), but he was INSISTENT that I had to revert the changes no matter what effort it took. I explained that even if I uninstalled then reinstalled the old software version and restored from a backup, the password expiration rule would still apply (I also had to spend time testing that out). To truly revert, I would have to repeat a full day’s worth of work. It made sense to just update our passwords regularly as this was the standard nearly everywhere, and move on with our lives. This was unacceptable to him.

    The next day I located the old install file for the outdated software and installed it. I restored from the next to last backup so all the recent work I’d recorded was not included. I then repeated that entire days’ worth of data entry all over again, plus other transactions my boss had completed while I was out, which I had to identify by comparing reports with a duplicate of our company file on another computer where I hadn’t done the re-install yet, which also meant I had various copies of our company file going. I could have messed this up and lost something, but fortunately I am solid in my technical skills, and meticulous.

    I was paid well there, and hourly, so for my own amusement I calculated what all this extra and duplicate work had cost this small company just to revert back to outdated software with almost two years’ worth of missing bug and security fixes, still no passwords to protect any of our data, and knowing full well that the version we were using might only be supported through the end of that year before we were actually force to upgrade. It was over $800!

    At my current job I now work with cybersecurity professionals implementing new solutions to protect company and customer data – very satisfying.

  270. Azure Jane Lunatic*

    There was a very large collection of floppy discs that no one was allowed to throw out, in case there was something important on it. It had been handed down for years, apparently.

    One of the grand middle managers finally got tired of it and pulled a minimally computer savvy person who could be spared out of the bullpen (me!) and tasked me with copying off every file to CD, in order to finally get rid of them. There were what felt like endless shoeboxes.

    After several ambitious Windows GUI-based Select All & Copy From Here To There, which failed due to corrupted files which couldn’t copy, I got mad. I looked up enough command line copy syntax to build a command that would copy the contents of every folder and file, skipping the unworkable ones, and I think show the errors on the screen. Then I spent the time while the files were copying over applying numeric labels to each disc to match the numeric folders in the file structure that I was going to burn to CD. Also reading LiveJournal logged out and posting via … I think it may have been via Google Doc, or Word, or Excel, or something really stupid like that. Because otherwise I was just sitting there for hours, occasionally hitting the keyboard.

    It took weeks. Weeks, and one abject plea to IT to please restore the following folder from backup because I had deleted the wrong thing. Occasionally the manager would uncover new boxes of discs at home, because she had the organizational skills of a particularly forgetful squirrel. (No shame, I have what I think is the same diagnosis, but at least it mostly applies to my personal life.)

    In the end, it filled two CDs. I made a little cover for them, because it seemed wrong to just hand her a naked CD — a composition book graphic with the contents written on the blank space, since anything more polished also seemed wrong.

    The CDs disappeared into her office and were probably never seen again. At least it took up less space than the discs.

    (She would later call on me to assist with submitting her travel receipts for reimbursement, since I’d established that I was competent, okay with computers, and didn’t shame her for her organization methods.)

  271. PurpleStar*

    I started a job in 2018. I moved into an office that a predecessor had occupied for 20+ years. She had passed away, and her coworker had left her office as it was—rather shrine-like. Queue up to that person retiring, and they hired a replacement. She didn’t clean the desk either—she moved to another office and closed the door.

    So I got a desk and filing cabinets that contained accounting reports, property deeds, vehicle registrations, government license filings, and more, dating back to the late 80s. Keep in mind the business had been founded in the early 70s. The worst part was convincing the current administration that most of it could be shredded.

  272. Whydobe*

    an entire department of non designers all have and must use In Design to generate a certain document they need to use on a weekly basis. I’m 90% sure someone tried to use ID to make a fillable PDF once for them but something got lost in translation. pretty sure they all hate it.

  273. L*

    Oh oh pick me. I lived the nightmare of The One Guy who kept our server together unexpectedly passing away. I’d been warning the boss for a full year that I was finding it increasingly hard to get in touch with him for any support, he sometimes turn up completely at random at my desk, a week after is figured out a patch for the issue, and every time I saw him he looked more and more ill (yellow eyes, etc). But I wasn’t allowed to move onto a new system because “he was cheap and had been good to us in the past”.

    When he died, my tight ass boss listened to a friend that said all we needed to do to make our whole business internet work was buy a heap of those cheap 5G routers and they’d work fine. Spoiler: might work for your home Netflix, didn’t work for us.

    *Finally* I secured a sponsorship contract with a data company that came with a heap of in-kind support and we joined the 21st century.

  274. No aurora*

    My hotel uses a bespoke retail software for the restaurant/lobby shop. It was apperently made by someone who quit just after finishing it and no one else was up to speed on how it worked. This resulted in it being extremely unwieldy, with outdated prices, outdated items, outdated functions, outdated employee discount function, a superfluous payment button and to top it all off: it’s not connected to our POS system.
    It was finally mostly updated, with the outdated functions updated and managers were given the ability to finally, FINALLY update prices and items but the superfluous payment button and lack of POS connection remains.
    The sunk-cost fallacy is clearly very entrenched and us employees suffer for it but I’m just glad that I don’t have to fix every single price, every single time, anymore

  275. The pope's softdev*

    I work as a softdev at a hospital and after we updated our Patient Admission System (PAS) from the 2003 to the 2022 version the internal app to track bed usage stopped working properly. Patient names were missing and you couldn’t see the status of a bed if a minor was occupying it.

    We made a brand new app that replicates all the original functionality of the bed tracker, but staff kept complain that it was ugly (who cares?), too hard to use (the old one had a bunch of unlabelled features that we labelled), and was too ‘new and risky’ (OURS ACTUALLY WORKED!).

    Eventually hospital exec realised that the nurses giving feedback were stalling because what they actually wanted was the old app to be fixed, not our new one. While I sympathise with them being hesitant to learn a new system, the old app ran on a Windows 2000 server and was held together with duct tape and hope. There was no fixing the old one. Eventually we told them that they had to use the new system, no exceptions, and a week later we unplugged the old server. Still to this day we get people requesting access to the old app…

Comments are closed.