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Nearly every office seems to have at least one broken/outdated/dysfunctional object, software, or process that Cannot Be Changed, no matter how inefficient.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?

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  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.

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    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.)

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          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.

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        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.”

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      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.

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        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.

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      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.

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      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!

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        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.

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          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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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      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.

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        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.

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        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!)

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      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.

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    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.

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      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.

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    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.

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      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.

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    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.

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      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.

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        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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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).

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      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.

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        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!).

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      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.

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        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!

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          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.

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            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…”

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            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.

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          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.

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        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.

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        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…

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        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!

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      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.

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      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.”

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          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 :/

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        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!!!!)

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    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

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      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.

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    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

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    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.

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    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.

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  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?!

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    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?

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  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.

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  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)

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  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.

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    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…!

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      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.

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    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…

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        1. Butterfly Counter*

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

          ButterflyCounterDissertationFinal-FinalFinal-Last-ThisOne-FinalToTurnIn-LastRevisions

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          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.

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            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

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              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.

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            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.

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    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. :)

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      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?

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    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.

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    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.

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      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???

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  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.

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  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.

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    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.

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    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

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      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.

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      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.

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  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!”

    Reply ↓
    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….

      Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
      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.)

        Reply ↓
        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.

          Reply ↓
      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?

        Reply ↓
    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!

      Reply ↓
      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.)

        Reply ↓
        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.

          Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
      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.”

        Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
      1. Snubble*

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

        Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
      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!

        Reply ↓
      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.”

        Reply ↓
      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.

        Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
    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?!

      Reply ↓
    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!

      Reply ↓
  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….

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
      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.

        Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
      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).

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  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…

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
  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…

    Reply ↓
    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!

      Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
      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.

        Reply ↓
      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.

        Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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?

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
    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. :)

      Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
    7. 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.

      Reply ↓
  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).

    Reply ↓
    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!

      Reply ↓
      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.

        Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
      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.

        Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
      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.

        Reply ↓
    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.

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  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.

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  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.

    Reply ↓
    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!”

      Reply ↓
      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.)

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  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!

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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.

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  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.

    Reply ↓
    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.)

      Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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!

    Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
    4. Ludd-ish*

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

      Reply ↓
    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.

      Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
    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).

      Reply ↓
  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.

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  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.

    Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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.

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  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.

    Reply ↓
  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!

    Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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.

    Reply ↓
  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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…

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  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.)

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  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.

    Reply ↓
    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!

      Reply ↓
      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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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…

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  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.

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  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.”

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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?”

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  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!

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  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.

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  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.

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    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…

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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    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.

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  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.

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  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!

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  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.

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  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.

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    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.

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  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.

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    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…

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  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.

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  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!

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    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.

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  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 -___-

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  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.

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  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”

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  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!

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

    Reply ↓
    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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

    Reply ↓
    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!

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  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…!

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

    Reply ↓
    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).

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  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).

    Reply ↓
    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!”

      Reply ↓
  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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    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.

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  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!!!

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  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.

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  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.

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  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

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    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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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’

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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    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.

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  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.

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  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!)

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.)

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  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.

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  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.

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    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.

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  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!

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  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.

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    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.

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  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!

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  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.

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  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!

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  146. Telegrams*

    There’s a note in our documentation for our ERP software that “previously to 2015, code #### was used for telegrams”.

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  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.

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  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).

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  149. 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!

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  150. 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.

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  151. 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.

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