the bread bag files, the dead language, and other broken but sacred systems

by Alison Green on October 22, 2024

Last week, we talked about broken systems that for some reason become sacred and cannot be changed. Here are some of my favorite stories you shared.

1. The bread bags

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.

2. The calendars

When I transitioned from one enrollment management office to another on campus nine 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 two 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 an 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.

3. The work space

An organization I worked at was moving buildings. One person ran a solo unit similar to a storeroom. She had a full scale meltdown when she found out her new workroom would not be the exact shape and dimensions as her previous room. They tried to convince her it would be nice to have windows. She insisted it would not. She had been working for 20 years without windows and nothing would convince her to have windows.

They caved into her bizarre demands and carved out a weird interior space for her the exact shape and size of her previous space. She put everything where it had been in the old building: the place to stack incoming supplies, the place to stack empty boxes, her desk and calculator, every single item. We’re in an earthquake zone so there are seismic pylons in various spots, which could not be in her space because that would change the dimensions. So they put walls up in awkward places that left strange, unusable space all around it. The beautiful large windows were in a narrow corridor that heated up in two seconds when the sun was out. Seismic pylons stuck out into other people’s spaces in awkward spots. The entire floor was wonky to navigate due to this one person’s insistence on The Old Way.

And guess what? Six years later she retired. Every single wall had to be taken down and moved to a sensible place, at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars.

4. The dead language

I work in museums. Another museum in our region had a staff member who kept all their crucial records – important not just for day-to-day work, but for the continuity of the entire institution – in a dead language that they were fluent in. It was a deliberate ploy to keep from ever being replaced. They had never actually been managed before a colleague of mine became their supervisor, and when they refused to change, they were let go and the records had to be translated.

5. Fall 2008

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.

6. The typewriter

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!”

7. The phone box in a well

I worked for many years in a social service organization located in a state forest. It was a former camp. The phone system was a nightmare, and we often heard that people could not get through to us. Initially, I disputed this as my phone was not ringing, and there were no voicemails. But then there were times that I was unable to make calls with my phone.

It turned out that, for some insane reason, the main phone connection box was located in the well, above the water line, but why??? So whenever it rained, we lost our phones. Mind you, the rest of the organization’s branches were located in the city, so it was bizarre to explain that we were unlikely to be reachable by phone the next day due to the predicted rain. I worked there for 12 years. They used a local company that was willing to go into the state forest, and that was less expensive than other phone options. They were big on using local companies.

I was there for five years before they moved the phone apparatus out of the well and into a building. I recall having an absolute meltdown at one point and saying to the senior director, “Why are you paying money for a phone system that does not have consistent service? The agency is being ripped off!” I don’t know if that was what finally did it or not.

8. The course catalog

I 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 would 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 three 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 implementation 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 was, “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.

9. The server

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 shaky 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.

10. The Excel workbook

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 1,000 people and there were four 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.

11. The calendars, part 2

I work in law. My old firm had 40-ish attorneys spread across eight 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 eight 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.

12. The ticker tape

I started at a ~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 six months to convince everyone that the world would not end and people would get paid if we used Excel and formulas.

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{ 222 comments }

{ 222 comments… read them below or add one }

    1. A rich tapestry*

      Yep.

      I’m half expecting that the phone people first needed to chase a cat past a piece of duct tape with honey in it to create a false moustache so they can imitate their colleague who doesn’t have a moustache in order to gain access or something.

      (Yes that is a real puzzle. Even has its own Wikipedia page – look up “cat hair moustache puzzle”)

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      1. A rich tapestry*

        Or maybe it could only be reached by using a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle (also real example)

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      1. TheOperaGhost*

        I used to lose internet every time it rained. I was with a large, National company. But when they installed the new lines underground , they didn’t insulate them properly. The Company was insistent there was nothing wrong with their lines, it must be our set up. The local tech knew what the problem was, but couldn’t get the suits to agree.

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      1. Xyzzy*

        >DOWN WELL

        It is very dark. You are likely to be eaten be a grue.

        >LIGHT LAMP

        There is a phone box here.

        >TAKE PHONE BOX

        You can’t take that.

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        1. Thegreatprevaricator*

          Hahaha I can feel the frustration rising.. 12 years old encountering this and WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CANT TAKE THAT

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  2. ArchivesPony*

    As an Archivist, #1 makes me shudder in horror. Not just for the record keeping but the fact that those bags were waxy

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      2. Martin Blackwood*

        I started asking myself that, but then realized that bread bags are enclosed on three sides instead of one. Less chance of stuff falling out. Ignore the existance of say, elastic bands. I also thought it was a cost saving thing, but surely bread bags are cheap enough you can buy 5000 and not reuse them

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        1. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

          Those waxy bags are also semi-waterproof, so in a messy office that has frequent spills (coffee or, idk, martinis) that would be a plus.

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        2. Orv*

          I guess those are good points, although I think I would have landed on manilla envelopes before I got to bread bags.

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        3. commensally*

          Yeah, bags would make sense if you might have original photos or slides, lots of individual receipts, or even occasional bits of 3d physical evidence. And waxed paper bags were the standard for convenient, cheap and waterproof before Ziploc was around. This would have made perfect sense in, I don’t know, 1957. Not 2000.

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          1. spuffyduds*

            I came up with a system sort of like this but in large grocery bags for a big yearly teen festival at our library that was mostly staffed by people from other branches. Each station was getting *some* paper printouts–the overall evening’s schedule and the instructions/rules for their specific station. But then there would also be a bunch of *objects*–pens and nametags for the registration station, Nerf bow & arrows & targets for the archery station, tiny bottles and food coloring containers and jars of glitter for the “potions” station, etc. I was writing up/purchasing/making all these things at different times, and it was easy to just drop them in the relevant bags. And it really streamlined setup to just be “here’s EVERYTHING for your station” when the volunteers showed up.

            But for a situation where all your items are just standard size paper? NAH.

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        4. Guacamole Bob*

          Also the existence of expanding file folders that have foldover tops and elastic bands built in. I know them as redwelds but I think that’s a brand name and other companies make them too. Because this need to have assorted paper items held all together and passed among people within an office is not new! Office supply manufacturers make readily available items to meet this need!

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      3. Hlao-roo*

        The person who wrote #1 left a second comment on the original post with more details:

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

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

        I think this will answer some of your questions and provide you with many, many new ones.

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        1. sacados*

          It’s funny, cause a lot of the animation industry still kind of operates like this. Back everything was drawn on paper, you would have one bag/envelope for every cut (scene) that contained all of the materials for that cut — each frame of layout or animation, special effects, backgrounds, color, all of it was on a separate piece of paper.
          Now of course this is mostly done digitally, but there are some places (Japan) where many of the old guard are really, really invested in keeping up the paper tradition.

          This actually became a real problem during the pandemic, because Japan closed off not only tourism but (in the beginning) a lot of the shipping from overseas. The animation studios who worked with outsource vendors in China or Korea were used to regularly receiving boxes of these “cut bags” for the director to review and make notes on.

          When those shipments were suddenly cut off, of course the solution was to send the files digitally instead. But many of the directors still insisted on doing their revisions on paper, resulting in an extra workload for the assistants who had to physically print out everything from the vendor, then scan it all back in again with the notes.

          In many cases it actually caused major delays in production from all the extra time this took!

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        2. Strive to Excel*

          Oh my God this makes it *so much worse*. The bit about the provenance of the bread bags *needs* to make it into the up-top post.

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      4. Ama*

        My guess is that the system was a relic from the days when layout had to be done on paper and they’d need to know how many “column inches” each thing took up, have the photo printed at the size they needed it, etc. I could see in that instance a bag being a little easier to corral a bunch of small pieces of paper than a regular file folder. (I have definitely lost a little scrap square cut out from some magazine out of a file folder before.)

        But once they were printing out full sheets of paper and doing the layout in software, there should have been some rethinking.

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      5. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        Hanging files might, as stated below, allow things to fall out of them. And they’re less portable- it sounds like they’re taking them to everyone’s desks, moving them around a lot, etc. I’m not defending it in the slightest- though I’d probably love imagining loaves of bread were landing magically on my desk- but at least that part seems logical. (Until you realize you can buy those hanging file folder holders and have one at each desk, but maybe that would take up too much room?)

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    2. Dust Bunny*

      Yeah, I started that one thinking that “bread bags” was just a dumb internal nickname for something digital . . . but nope, they meant literal bread bags.

      Once again, I would like to send all my coworkers cards for being not-crazy.

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      1. Orv*

        Not only bread bags, but waxed paper ones. How old were these bags? Every loaf of bread I ever bought came in cellophane or plastic film.

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        2. Petty Patty*

          Wait, did they not mean plastic bags? They meant literal waxed bags? I’m 52 and I don’t even know what those are.

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          1. BatManDan*

            Look up a pastry / bakery item called a kringle. I’m betting it’s sold in waxy bread bag. The ones sold at Trader Joe’s are.

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            1. doreen*

              I think finally know what this is about – “bread bag” threw me off because I’ve never seen them used for bread, only for certain baked goods like a Danish ring or maybe a strudel.

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      2. Generic Name*

        This reminds me of how the now CEO of my old company insisted on naming the file within the project file that housed the final deliverable that was submitted to the client a “token” file. As in it was named “TOKEN”, usually in all caps. If you asked him why, he’d give you a pitying look and pantomime with his hands the act of giving you a coin or small object, and he’d say, “It’s because it’s like you’re giving a TOKEN to the client”. Still baffled.

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    3. Caramel & Cheddar*

      This reminded me of “The Book” in The Devil Wears Prada, but at least that was still a book/binder with lots of things taped to actual pages!

      Reply ↓
        1. AFac*

          I find the search function in Outlook to be dubious, honestly. Not sure if it’s Outlook or the way my brain thinks of search terms.

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          1. 2 Cents*

            The search function in Outlook needs to die a long, cold death. I search for an email I received the previous week, it loads up one I got literal years before!? It’s terrible.

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        3. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          Oh come now, the Outlook scheduling function isn’t THAT bad! It isn’t great maybe but Outlook search is nearly unusable.

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          1. SarahKay*

            I find the more recent ‘drop down form’ version of it to be irritating, but I started using the search when you had to know and type the parameters into the main search bar, and doing it that way still works really well for me.

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    2. smirkette*

      This is been an issue with every. single. higher ed. institution. I have ever worked with or at. While I do understand just how busy academics are and how much institutions like to bog them down with commitments, it makes life absolute hell for support staff who have to use 1980 worksflows while being expected to hit 2024 efficiency targets.

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    3. chiffonades*

      to be fair, scheduling assistant function in outlook is useless sometimes when I am scheduling something for many people with complicated schedules. If I can see whether the one person who can’t make a meeting time just has a one-on-one check-in that can easily be moved, then it makes it so much easier to schedule a meeting. Simply clicking the “find the next available time” sometimes can make a meeting be scheduled weeks out. Most of my job is around scheduling internal meetings and I have asked many staff to share at least meeting titles with me so I can see if something is moveable for a more important meeting.

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      1. Observer*

        Still better than running around and looking at a dozen printouts that are no longer up to date, though!

        I feel your pain, though. This is why we sometimes use Doodle for scheduling. I’m thinking of proposing that we actually get a paid subscriptions so it can be integrated properly into Outlook.

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    4. 1-800-BrownCow*

      This is explained to people at my company all the time, yet some people schedule meetings without using it and then get upset when people reject their meeting request because they already have a meeting scheduled at that time or are going to be out on PTO!!

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      1. Katie*

        I complain to my manager all the time that I need to have a ‘how to schedule a meeting’ training session. People are shocked! when I decline their not so important meeting.

        I get it that sometimes it hard to schedule meetings when everyone’s calendars are booked but some people do not even look.

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    6. Lydza*

      My first season as a field science technician I worked for a grad student on a project where we clipped areas of vegetation into paperbags that would be weighed later. He had us carry a full sized cooler across the prairie to store the samples and our tools, which I never questioned until the following year when a new tech suggested everyone just put them in their backpacks instead of lugging coolers around for miles. That’s when I learned that the longer you stay in science the less common sense you have, which I can now confirm first hand after my PhD rotted my brain.

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      2. Generic Name*

        Omggg, I had this exact same job!!! But the bags and tools and were kept in plastic totes, and fortunately we just drove up to the sample plots in the ancient CJ7.

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  4. Orv*

    #7 — having seen some similarly bizarre situations, I suspect the well house was the first building constructed, so the main connection point for the phone service (the demarc, as it’s known in the industry) went there by default.

    I used to frequent a small, private airport that had a run-down old house on one corner of the property. This house could never be torn down, because it was technically the only official building on the site; all the hangars were technically “outbuildings” and power and phone service for them was fed from the house. Also, the whole operation was grandfathered in as a non-conforming use under county zoning, and any changes would have risked invalidating that status.

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      2. Orv*

        There was one grass runway with no lighting and no control tower, so the presence of power on the site at all was strictly a convenience. Pilots announced their own arrivals and departures on the unicom frequency, if their planes happened to be radio-equipped. This is a way more common situation than you might imagine if you’ve never flown in small planes.

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        1. FashionablyEvil*

          Suddenly it makes sense why you pay so much more for life insurance if you fly small planes! Good gravy.

          Reply ↓
          1. Orv*

            The funny thing about that is…it’s not. Midair collisions between planes are way, way down the list of fatal accident types, and most of these airports see so little traffic, and traffic is moving slowly enough, that see-and-avoid works pretty well.

            By *far* the most common cause of fatalities is flying into poor visibility, getting disoriented, and losing control of the airplane. A lot of small plane pilots aren’t instrument-rated.

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              1. Orv*

                There was an FAA circular about flight testing that had the memorable quote, “The laws of aerodynamics are unforgiving, and the ground is hard.”

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                1. Reality.Bites*

                  The way I see it is if I’m in a car with someone and they have a medical emergency I can grab the wheel and have a chance of steering us to safety.

                  If I take the thing that looks like a wheel in a plane I’ll just make it crash faster.

                2. Kevin Sours*

                  The thing is a crash isn’t terribly likely in a plane in that scenario. Most planes with no control input will return to straight level flight and their isn’t that much to run into if you don’t actively avoid it.

          2. Selina Luna*

            You said that, and my thought was, in all caps, “IT’S NOT???” So I went back and checked, and yep, that’s an “m” at the end of that word, not an “r-n.”

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  6. Salty Caramel*

    I worked in an office in 1994 where the director printed out all her emails and kept them in a binder. I hope like hell she’s still not doing that. (I left a few years later)

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    1. CR*

      At a previous job I had to print out files, like emails, and put them in envelopes and then file them in big cabinets. When the cabinets got full, they were boxed up and moved to offsite storage. I have no idea what happened to them after that.

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      1. Richard Hershberger*

        They are still there, the firm paying monthly rent. They could hire an outside company to scan them. but that would be expensive.

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    2. Too Long Til Retirement*

      My current boss, in the year 2024, is still printing out emails. Does he print ALL emails? No. Does he print way too many of them? Yes, yes he does.

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      1. DramaQ*

        Did you guys work at my old company? This was the procurement guy. He had been in that position since the day the company opened and would be darned if anyone would question his system. When he retired they tried to hire a replacement three of them quit within a week. So they tried to get him to go online so corporate could do it. NOPE! He sent out a very passive aggressive company wide email about how offended he was that people just didn’t understand how much better his system was. He managed to make the corporate person quit which had me howling. Finally they gave up trying to make him change and just let him retire. I felt so bad for the new person they were stuck with his system because it was so arcane it would have taken them months to convert all that to electronic.

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        1. BatManDan*

          If I worked anywhere in that company (and had not previously seen such signs of insanity), I would have quit on principle (“I’m surrounded by idiots”) even if that man’s work didn’t affect me in the least. Holy cow.

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      2. Frank Doyle*

        Mine too! She prints them out and puts them in the daily “mail” pile and my coworker and I have to read them. They they get put in another pile for a couple of months and then they are recycled. Just cc me!!

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    3. Spider Plant Mom*

      Ages ago I took over a position for someone who was retiring, the system to process phone programming changes had me printing the original email, the digital programming record, the updated programming record, and the email confirming completion. Then that whole package stored in filing cabinets and on to Long Term Storage.

      It took no less than 10 meetings to convince the phone programmers that it was silly to print the record, mark it up with pen, then scan and email it to them when I could paste the programming record (formatting included!!) into a Word document and mark it up with Track Changes.

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      1. ampersand*

        This reminds me: one of the software developers at the university I used to work at would print out pages and pages and pages (I’m talking stacks that were multiple inches thick) of code when something needed to be changed, for reference and to show us (in meetings!) what was changing. And once he had everyone’s buy in, he would update it. Ten years later I’m still horrified when I think of this.

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    4. irritable vowel*

      I used to work in a place where a few employees would frequently print out emails and bring them down the hall to my office to ask me if I could respond to the person. How do you not know about forwarding?! (I once scandalized one of them by retrieving their lovingly printed out email from my recycling bin when they came to ask me about it.)

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    5. WonderKB*

      My first job as an EA was supporting an exec who had me print her emails and put them in color coded folders for her to review, and then she would add notes so I could ghost write her emails back to people. Surprisingly it wasn’t as horribly inefficient as you’d think (though still a waste of time), but did make me sound like a nut when I asked at my next job, “how would you like me to organize your printed emails on your desk?” Sigh…

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    6. Leave Hummus Alone*

      I worked at a place where the director didn’t “trust” Excel and had us print out the entire database of people stored in Excel to store in a binder. Heaven forbid a new person is added or removed, because then you had to reprint everything!

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    1. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      I am trying and failing to write something about teapots and llamas in either pseudo-Old English or pseudo-Latin.

      “Hwaet!”

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    3. Coverage Associate*

      I promise the story is not about me, but I do write notes to myself in Latin or Hebrew sometimes, because something can be expressed with fewer letters than in English.

      Once, the admin who usually took notes for the other admins missed the meeting and the office manager decided after the meeting to circulate my personal notes. I was the lowest ranking professional in the meeting, and I got to listen to the admins complaining about the notes being in Latin.

      Then there’s the times I have made critical sermon notes in my Sunday order of service, only to have the rector ask me to pass around my copy of the order of service because the picture on the cover was important and everyone else had already recycled theirs.

      Oh, and, yeah, my diary is in Latin so my mother could never read it.

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      1. Sharpie*

        Lingua latina bona est. Volo videre canale in VosTubo, nomine Polymathy.

        Luke Ranieri actually speaks Latin on his channel Polymathy, and has a channel that’s all in Latin, too; Scorpio Martianus.

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      2. Quill*

        I used to be able to write things in one of Tolkein’s elven languages… ish (whichever one was laid out in the appendix to my copy of Return of the King). That is, I used the letters as a cypher instead of, you know, knowing the *language* he invented, a thing which I was nerdy enough to do but hadn’t the money or access to extra materials to achieve.

        It made writing secret diary entries a very long process.

        Reply ↓
        1. TheOperaGhost*

          If you are still interested check out Ardalambion and the Quenya course. (Also, be prepared for late 90s website design)

          Reply ↓
      3. berturt*

        Oh wow, that’s awesome.

        Reminds me of a friend I had in the late 90s who would make notes at meetings in shorthand! I was so impressed. She wasn’t some old steno from the 70s or anything, either! Just learned it in college, I think & always used it. Of course, she would then go back & translate them to english (and I assume digitally…).

        Reply ↓
    4. Nonanon*

      Listen, sometimes you file the TPS report, sometimes you summon an ancient demon. All in a day’s work at the museum!

      Reply ↓
      1. Hlao-roo*

        Black magic is one of many occupational hazards!

        (From the “an employee is putting magic curses on her coworkers” post from December 27, 2017)

        Reply ↓
    5. many bells down*

      I’m currently in a museum studies program and I’m dying to find a way to use this as an example of “worst practices”

      Reply ↓
    6. Worldwalker*

      I really want to know what language it is — and what alphabet/abjad/abugida it was written in. Latin isn’t even all that dead (after all, the ATMs in the Vatican City operate in Latin). Did it require cuneiform? Hieroglyphs? Sabaean?

      I love the idea of Middle Egyptian, myself. It’s actually a pretty straightforward language, and since it’s generally written in hieroglyphs, it’s artistic as well. Though I can see having to make up some determinatives … you’d probably need one for “office” for instance, though there’s one for “place” that could work. That story appears to be academic, so writing out “money” with a determinative of “place” would be the bursar’s office, while a “person” determinative would make it the bursar. “Money” and an “abstract concept” determinative might be tuition. Or, of course, you could just transliterate it as “brsr” with the appropriate determinative to make it the office or the official. (yes, this is why hieroglyphs were the scribe’s full employment act!)

      Though this would require some artistic ability on the part of the person in question. (if any ancient Egyptian ever has to read my scrawl … well, I scrawl just as badly in hieroglyphs as I do in the Roman alphabet, if not worse.

      Maybe something written in cuneiform would work better? There are quite a few options to choose from. Or how about moving over to the Indian subcontinent and using Sanskrit, with one of the associated writing systems? Oooh, how about Old Church Slavonic? That apparently gives even people who know the Slavic languages migraines. Etruscan might be fun. Or how about Georgian, with its old runes?

      Yeah, he probably just wrote it all in Latin, but where’s the fun in that?

      Reply ↓
  9. Librarian*

    I’m dying to know which dead language. Bonus points if it was Esperanto (yes I know it is an artificial language and therefore not technically “dead.”)

    Reply ↓
    2. Ama*

      I used to work with a bunch of experts in dead languages and people would call us all the time to do random translation projects (although most of the time it was personal stuff like “can someone translate this phrase from our wedding vows to Aramaic so I can have some artwork made”), so my first thought was that there are a lot more people in the world who know dead languages than that employee realized (particularly in the museum/ancient history field!).

      Reply ↓
      1. Strive to Excel*

        The problem is that there’s a difference between “can translate a phrase into [dead language]” and “can translate many, many years of [dead language] records”. For instance, I can get a basic Latin translation done relatively easily based on my high school years and a decent dictionary. But years of records? Where it can be guaranteed that the person has used equivalent phrases, because dead languages don’t necessarily have jargon counterparts? That’s a significant and expensive undertaking.

        He should have been fired way earlier when the dead language thing was first discovered.

        Reply ↓
        1. Dust Bunny*

          OMG THIS. There is enough analog work in archives already without putting somebody on staff periodically out of commission because they have to translate internal records. And if you don’t have someone who can do that then you have to pay to have them translated.

          This person should have been fired much, much, sooner. Fail, but bigger management fail.

          Reply ↓
          1. MigraineMonth*

            You need to dispense with an employee the instant you find out someone is sabotaging work systems to make themselves indispensable. It’s only ever going to get worse from there.

            Also, what’s up with him not having had a manager? That seems like a serious oversight.

            Reply ↓
        2. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

          I’d say a PIP would be adequate. “Translate everything and keep the notes in English (or whatever the language of the institution was) going forward, or you can find a job somewhere that operates in Hittite.”

          Reply ↓
        3. Worldwalker*

          Well, there are probably a lot of repeated details. It’s not like he invented a new way of saying something he had to say repeatedly. Whatever “Filed the TPS report” was the first time, it would have been all the way through the records. So at least there’s that.

          Reply ↓
        4. Kevin Sours*

          It sounds like he was: “when they refused to change, they were let go”

          My read was once it was discovered there was a “very funny now fix this” moment and when that didn’t get the proper response he was out. It just took entirely too long to discover.

          Reply ↓
      2. HannahS*

        That specific example makes me smile, because of course Jewish wedding contracts are still written in Aramaic! When I got married, we had a scribe illumunate the borders. The English is on the back.

        Reply ↓
    3. metadata minion*

      There are still a couple thousand native Esperanto speakers!

      But yes, I want to know what language. I really hope it was Hittite or something else really obscure.

      Reply ↓
        1. Kevin Sours*

          Unfortunately there isn’t really a fully developed Elvish language. The grammar and such is solid but there isn’t enough vocabulary to be usable (at least if you don’t count fan additions).

          Reply ↓
    4. Nightengale*

      patients can choose “Esperanto” as preferred language in our EHR

      I had a family one time click on that instead of English. I asked at the visit if they had meant to choose Esperanto and they had no idea what Esperanto was. Which I guess is good because we had not made any effort to contract with an Esperanto-English interpreter.

      Reply ↓
  10. Union*

    Oh my god, the course scheduling.

    One day my freshman year, one of the graduate students posted frantically on every Facebook page and group chat asking if anyone had seen a manilla folder with a bunch of index cards taped to cardstock in it.

    Also that semester, the course catalog came out late by a week or so. What a coincidence!

    Later I found out that one (1) professor would take the 100+ courses scheduled for the next semester, all the emails from other professors about scheduling, and a list of the classrooms in the building and schedule everything by hand. And then his lucky graduate student would get to transcribe that into an Excel sheet.

    This led to fun situations like “the second-year Llama Grooming majors can’t take the required Shear Sharpening course this semester because there’s only one section and the Llama Ferrier majors have priority” (and then of course the next semester everything would be off-cycle for dozens of students) and “I know we told you there are 8 electives to choose from, but we’ve scheduled them so that you only have one option, and it’s the most boring one, and also it might not even count towards your graduation requirements” and “this class is scheduled for 2 hours, but it’s really 90 minutes because the adjunct who teaches it also teaches at another school across the city and we ignored her when she said she needed 30 minutes to get here”.

    The school only upgraded to a digital system when the professor died unexpectedly right before a new semester.

    The same school also paid me $15 an hour, ten hours a week, 20 weeks a year, because the admissions office still used paper applications. Until 2020. Oh, prospective students applied online through the Common App, and SAT/ACT scores were sent digitally. But then the assistant registrar would print all of that out and I would alphabetize them into individual folders for each applicant. [TBH this is still my favorite job I’ve ever had. Headphones in, sorting papers, admissions officers would bring me snacks. Pretty great.]

    Reply ↓
    1. namuh*

      My brain hurts right now from trying to deal with people [read: academics], so this job sounds like an absolute dream.

      Reply ↓
    2. Dex*

      We had a similar issue when our state went to a common application. We weren’t set up to accept it electronically, so we would have to print them out and manually enter them into the system.

      Our office was always a bit behind the times, though. Years after other offices had moved to a digital storage system, we still had a massive file room where we were keeping student records in file folders (with all of the potential for random documents to wander off – and they very often did!) as well as huge basement storage rooms full of older files. When we finally got scanners and access to the digital storage, it was life-changing, but it took FOREVER because the old way was “just how we do it.”

      Reply ↓
      1. Jam on Toast*

        Never discount academia to do it hardest way possible. In 2013, while I was doing my PhD, I worked as a Teaching Assistant for a faculty member who kept all student grades for a 200-person course in a long, taped-together sheet of blue account book paper scroll.

        There was a fully functioning LMS (learning management system), which all students and TAs and faculty could access but she refused point blank to use it. I thought it was a technical know-how issue, so I offered to help set it up for her because I’d been using the LMS for years at that point and could have it done it 15 minutes flat.

        From her reaction, you would have thought I’d suggested we rob a bank at gunpoint. No! Absolutely not! Grades were not going to be put in the LMS under any circumstances! So the 8 or so TAs for this huge, first-year course had to record all our grades for quizzes and essays and the final exam on individual sheets of account paper, then give them to her acolyte, who re-recorded them into the faculty’s taped-scroll-of-true-grades, before the acolyte then had to re-enter all of the grades into the actual LMS at the end of term. The hours of wasted time were staggering.

        Reply ↓
    3. Cinnamon Stick*

      JFC, even 25 years ago, someone should have dumped that into Access. Which only scales up so far, but still…

      Reply ↓
      1. Orv*

        The trick with Access is it needs a real database as a backend if you’re going to have more than about four simultaneous users. Microsoft really wants that real database to be MSSQL, but any SQL database with Windows ODBC drivers will work. I’ve used MySQL before.

        Reply ↓
  11. ADHD Librarian*

    I was late to the party on the original post, but one librarian I worked with insisted on keeping the “DOS” version of our library content management system. So I had to use both the usual graphic user interface and figure out the commands for the text-only system. And this was 2010!

    Reply ↓
    1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      The job I quit in 2021 still used an AS400 program from the 80’s for part of the job. It was linked to like, three different databases and they were all cobbled together to make one functioning unit. When I was asked by an outside consultant what I’d change about the job, I point blank said, “Change the Frankensoftware.” To which every other employee around me chimed in with, “YES!” I’m not sure they’ve fully converted to a central system, but they were working on it when I left.

      Reply ↓
    2. Courthouse Denizen*

      I work for the courts and our case management system is still run on MS-DOS. Thank god it’s not DOS itself, but MS-DOS is bad enough imo, for 2024.

      Reply ↓
    3. Wilbur*

      The Fortune 50 company I worked at still used a DOS based system for internal orders. Need an extension cord? Gotta check the internal system first, and go page by page looking at the ~60 character description to see if it was what you wanted. Management said it would cost too much to replace the system. Honestly, most of the procurement systems I’ve used are terrible.

      Reply ↓
  12. Jamboree*

    #8 (the course catalog) made me laugh bc SAME except phone books. I started in a university’s telecom dept in the 80’s and of course we had to proofread it before printing. We dreaded it every year and fought to get the pages with the most blank space bc we never had time to do this during work hours so we’d have to bring them home. See also the 6 foot tall paper phone bill that had
    to be sorted by address and stuffed into envelopes and mailed out. Talk about painting the Golden Gate Bridge!

    Reply ↓
  13. namuh*

    #8 – I worked for a federal-state partner program that had an ancient and abysmal database system that we both applied for our annual grants and did annual and five-year reporting. I kind of enjoyed knowing that our deadlines for application/reporting was always a soft deadline, because the system would break and the deadline would get extended. I legitimately think the reason we kept it for so long is because the guy who made it seemed like he really liked us. He was our direct contact if (when) something went wrong (not an employee of the federal sponsor or any of the state programs, he was a random contractor that probably charged the same rate he did in 1999 when he created the database). He’d come to our annual meeting on his own dime and just hang around in case anyone wanted to talk to him about the system. So I believe 100% that people felt bad for John!

    Reply ↓
  14. Jamoche*

    > in a computer language he wrote

    Way back in the 80s, when I was a new college grad looking for a programming job in a part of the country where they were rare, I interviewed with a one-man company who was looking for a second programmer. I don’t remember exactly what the software was for – supporting some sort of very obscure hardware – and I was already a bit suspicious about a codebase with only one author, but at least it would be experience.

    Then he said he’d invented his own language. Nope! That job would be absolutely of no use on a resume.

    Reply ↓
  15. sacados*

    #1 reminds me of back when I was an editorial assistant at a magazine. Now, this was years ago but still we’re talking 2008-2010, not Ye Olde Times. A major city, although not in the US.

    So one of my jobs was to source the photos that we used in the magazine — we often did writeups and reviews of TV programs, so that included the promotional stills for those shows. For multiple reasons, many of the (major, national!) TV stations refused to send promo stills via email. So every week, I had to physically go down to the TV station building, check in at reception, wait to get badged in, then take the elevator up to the marketing department. Where I didn’t even need to actually *speak* to anyone, there was just a big cork board outside that department’s area with a bunch of envelopes labeled with each publication’s name. Then I took the printed photos back to our office where the art department would scan them into the computer to lay out in the magazine.

    It was incredibly frustrating!

    Reply ↓
  16. Steve*

    I worked for a place that refused to let me, the only events person, have knowledge of or access to the event registration program the firm owned. I was told I had to use Outlook for all invites even to clients. For in house events, I had to send a mass email to everyone in the office (250 employees) and rely on those who added it to their calendars to understand how many to plan for. Of course there was no way to capture dietary restrictions so the catering person would monitor the “accepts” and she just had to ‘know’ what peoples preferences were. For all staff events where all 250 employees had to be accounted for, I had to keep a spreadsheet of each response and follow up with them individually if they just hadnt responded. I kept suggesting that there were much easier ways to do this but they didnt care.

    Reply ↓
  17. Aleph*

    This is a very, very minor one, but one of my coworkers is insistent about everyone in the office sorting our recycling into separate containers. She gets extremely annoyed and passive-aggressively huffy when she moves items that people have tossed in the wrong bin. However, coworker puts material that can’t be recycled (certain plastics, paper towels, wax-coated paper) in the bins.

    And yet – our cleaning crew dumps all recycling into the same bag. They do this in our department and throughout the building. They have done this in front of her and she says nothing. (I have noticed she never greets or acknowledges anyone from our cleaning crew, who mostly speak Spanish, although some are also fluent in English, so side eye to that too.)

    Reply ↓
  18. Nicki Name*

    Two thoughts in quick succession on #4:

    1) At last we’ve found the social-science equivalent of the guy who writes a system in a programming language only he knows.

    2) This sounds like a Tom Gauld cartoon.

    Reply ↓
  19. gmg22*

    Some of these publishing-industry-adjacent stories and comments in response am giving me major flashbacks to my first newspaper copy-desk gig — where we employed a classically gruff fellow, who happened to be a longtime Author of Renown, as a columnist. He refused, in the late 1990s, to have any truck with email or a computer that could send said email. So the steps needed to get his column from his brain to our system were as follows: 1)he would type his column on his typewriter, 2)his wife would fax it to us, 3)we would run it through a scanning machine which, typical for the era, would provide us with a digital file riddled with typos, 4)we would review the digital file using the fax for reference and fix all the typos, and only then could we 5)actually start to edit the dang column.

    It was still delightfully good fun to edit him because like I said, the man was a legend, but it sure came with strings attached!

    Reply ↓
    2. NoMoreFirstTimeCommenter*

      English is not my native language but it’s always fun to learn new expressions. This time, “to have any truck with” was a new one for me. It’s pretty late in my time zone and I was reading pretty quickly, so I got a bit confused at first – I didn’t know that trucks would generally have email systems (though in these days they actually might…), and why would a newspaper columnist need a truck at all, with or without email?

      Reply ↓
      2. DancinProf*

        “Truck” in this sense means “dealings.” It’s not a very common usage now but dates back to the 1200s. Comes from an Old French word, “troquer,” “to truck, shop, barter, exchange.” (I looked this up in the OED and thank you for motivating me to do so! I love etymologies.)

        Reply ↓
        1. Retiring Academic*

          I believe that the US term for what in the UK would be a market garden is a truck garden. Is that true? It’s the same use of truck to mean dealing or trade.

          Reply ↓
          1. lin*

            Oooooohhhhh, I always interpreted that as “the farmers bring their stuff to the market in a truck and sell it out of the bed”.

            Chalk that up to another one of those things I always interpreted wrong and I have learned from this site!

            Reply ↓
          2. BatManDan*

            “stealin’ watermelons out of our truck patch” – Tony Joe White, in the song Poke Salad Annie (“poke salad” is a whole ‘nother derivative with some colorful connotations)

            Reply ↓
  20. Nut Case*

    Im not sure if this counts as archaic or not but I work in the community services sector and there is a Family Services department that, much to my surprise, compose casenotes in Microsoft Word format.
    My own department as with others in the office use various forms of Casefile Management databases.
    But considering the Family Services teams usually receive the most funding, for them to have to use Microsoft Word, then save and store case notes and relevant documents the old fashioned way just seems so inefficient.

    Reply ↓
  21. Ciela*

    Oh my, the dead language. I am the exact opposite. Where I work, and have worked for 25+ years, there is a lot of information that is only in my head. There is some information where it make sense to put notes in the job tracking software . Sometimes in the job files themselves. But So Much Info, is only in my head. I don’t want to be the sole repository of knowledge!

    But we also have a bunch of always / never advice for new employees, also mostly in my head. Things like, “make sure to NEVER put this type of item in this machine. It WILL catch on fire.” My favorite was a new guy who would often comment, “that’s oddly specific”.

    Reply ↓
    1. Caz*

      I was writing up some instructions on a process just today that included “DO NOT tell this team what you’re doing until you have done it and you need them to take a step, they WILL act too soon and you WILL spend 3 weeks fixing the problem that causes.” Yes, it is oddly specific. Yes, those were my three weeks…

      Reply ↓
    2. lizzay*

      OMG for love of all that is holy PLEASE start writing that stuff down! Just take a few extra minutes when you do something & note it! I started a new job semi-recently, thrown in the deep end where hardly anything was documented and it was a nightmare trying to figure things out! After more than 2 years, I’m still coming up with processes I didn’t know about! It would have been so much easier if there had been some kind of document with, at the very least, a high-level list of to-dos!

      Reply ↓
  22. Kes*

    As someone in tech…
    1 – I’ve heard of many different types of CMS – but this is the first time I’ve heard of a bread bag based CMS lol
    9 – does not surprise me. I think “have you tried turning it off and on again” is at least a little more known now as basic IT troubleshooting, even if many don’t follow it – but this does sound a bit more back in the day. I’m a bit surprised they let Jim go on vacation with no backup plan if it took things down that much though.
    10 – sounds like an Excel document that should really be a database
    12 – I had to go back and check the date on that one. Did not expect ticker tape to be featured in this decade

    Reply ↓
  23. Chirpy*

    Okay, #4 is kind of fantastic (insane, but fantastic).

    Also, what was the conversation like after they left? “Hi, we need a DeadLanguage translator. No, the documents are not ancient. They’re last week’s records” ??

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  24. Caz*

    OK, these beat all my stories and I once worked at a place where we had a “destruction day” (it was fun, the shredder overheated at least twice) during which I found paperwork older than I was.

    Reply ↓
  26. Bananapants*

    The typewriter one reminded me of a Canadian university I did a summer program at in 2013. When they issued our temp IDs, they took our pictures on an old webcam and printed them onto a perforated paper ID template sent through a dot matrix printer. Each ID then had to be popped out by hand and laminated individually. All of us summer program students also got a meal plan, and the university issued each of us (20-odd students) a huge stack of business-card-sized meal tickets (1 per meal) that were HAND SIGNED by a manager. I really hope all of this was just for the summer students because I can’t imagine how inefficient that would be for a full university!

    Reply ↓
  28. SarahKay*

    #9 nearly made me decorate my keyboard with tea. I loved “The server was mysterious, and Jim knew what to do” but then to discover that Jim was just turning it off and on again :-D

    Reply ↓
  29. Filofaxes*

    I re-read the original “bread bags” story like 3 times because I was convinced it was somehow code for something else entirely, like drugs or something. And I was just missing that in the comments of the original article. But no. They were talking about honest to god bread bags for managing print media files. Okay. (I’ve worked in print media, back in the early 2000s so like, I don’t know why I’m surprised by this).

    Reply ↓
      1. Unkempt Flatware*

        Why not just a tote or something? I mean, I’m glad it wasn’t a petroleum based product but this is all so odd!

        Reply ↓
  31. Fulano*

    #3: No, just no. “I’m sorry but we are proceeding with our new facility plan. Will it make sense for you to continue here if it causes you so much distress?”

    Reply ↓
    1. CubeFarmer*

      Yeah, that was a management failure.

      I always assume that anyone who is accommodated like this must have compromising photographs of the leadership. Because every office I have worked in has someone who seems to be able to get away with everything.

      Reply ↓
  32. JanetM*

    This was a one-off, not a sacred system, but some years ago, a student assistant came to my desk muttering about how he had to go through a long Excel spreadsheet and separate everyone’s email address into their username and the rest of the information.

    His supervisor had him clicking in the cell, hitting F2 to edit, highlighting just the username, hitting CTRL-X to delete it, hitting F2 to get out of edit mode, and pasting the username into a new column.

    I showed him how to use Text-to-Columns.

    His supervisor was not pleased with me.

    It was a few years later that someone suggested the supervisor wanted to keep him busy for several hours and was unhappy that he finished so quickly.

    Reply ↓
  33. Antilles*

    #3 is incredible. I’ve worked with a bunch of companies that have moved offices. Typically you might (might!) get a voice in which of the offices you end up in, but certainly never being able to actively redesign your office’s floor plan. Especially given the fact that seismic pylons ended up sticking out everywhere, which likely means that the original office design was based on architectural codes, seismic engineering requirements, etc.
    I assume her role in stockroom management was something that literally nobody else wanted to do, because that’s the only thing that makes sense for why management didn’t just shrug and vaguely blame the “city design code”.

    Reply ↓
    1. NotBatman*

      Right!?!?! Either she was singlehandedly holding up the company, or she witnessed the CEO murder someone and was blackmailing them. That was bananacrackers.

      Reply ↓
  34. CubeFarmer*

    LW #12: Where does one even GET ticker tape anymore? Unless they mean the long receipt tapes like cash registers have?

    Reply ↓
    1. Frank Doyle*

      I was picturing like an adding machine with a long roll of tape. We have one of those in our supply cabinet. We have a lot of obsolete stuff in our supply cabinet.

      Reply ↓
    2. 3-Foot Tall Inflatable Rainbow Unicorn*

      I think that’s what OP meant – receipt tapes or adding machine tape. (You can still get that stuff pretty cheaply, although I’m willing to bet that it’s used only by quilters and not actual adding machines)

      Reply ↓
      1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        My last job, I quit in 2021, and started in 2018. My boss, who had started her retirement calendar count down before I started, still used an adding machine for a lot of things. I ended up using one too, just because it was easier to adapt than to fight it. When I moved to this job (different company, young new owners), we packed up all the adding machines and shoved them in a closet. We all use our cellphones for calculators and the world has, to my knowledge, not flown apart.

        Reply ↓
      2. CubeFarmer*

        Oh, yes, if that’s what LW means, then that’s still readily available. Our finance director, until very recently, used to use it to quick-check his own calculations sometimes (but he never kept it as any kind of documentation.)

        Reply ↓
    3. commensally*

      We were still required to send an adding machine tape to Accounting every week with our deposit slips to show that we added the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters correctly until 2020 shook everything up, and some staff still do it; any office supplier will still have adding machine tape and adding machines. (And we do still have to send in a paper form that walks us through doing some of the other money-counting by hand, step by step.)

      Reply ↓
  35. Seashell*

    Regarding #2, couldn’t the IT guy just go to everyone’s office and say, “I need to fix something on Outlook” and solve the problem in seconds?”

    Reply ↓
  36. Lorax*

    Ok, so the dead languages one is pretty funny. I mean, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that situation, but from the outside… that level of esoteric pettiness is inspiring.

    Reply ↓
  37. Statler von Waldorf*

    #4 – I once heard a story (it’s third hand so it’s truth is questionable) about a bookkeeper who kept all their notes in Klingon. I hear it started innocently enough, it was just so the non-accounting employees who were in and out of her office couldn’t read her notes, but apparently it eventually escalated into a full-blown thing and she actually used that as leverage to get herself a very nice raise.

    I know for a fact she started in ’04, she can write and speak in fluent Klingon, and that she’s still working there. Here’s a pile of salt to go with the rest, please take only one grain so there is enough for everyone.

    Reply ↓
  38. PokeyPuppy*

    When I started working at a small used bookstore in 2007, the owner was doing all the financials by hand, or in Microsoft Word 93. They didn’t even have Excel. THE STORE OPENED IN 2001, AND THIS WAS THEIR SYSTEM.

    But at least they let me update it!

    Reply ↓
  39. Til*

    This reminds me of my job I took over as management that sent handmade gift baskets to people. When I got there in 2021 I was told I needed to keep paperwork for 90 days and there was a small file cabinet so I figured i would just take out anything from more than 90 days…

    I was horrified to find files from 2016 and it was stuffed full so I went looking around to figure out if there was any more paperwork… There was paper stuffed above our walking cooler, files stuffed under the table in food prep areas, files stuffed under the computer area (so the computers couldn’t breath), files stuffed in the break doom and, a storage unit full of paperwork all of it contains every order we took, every order we sent out, two copies of receipts for all of those orders, employees records plus random stuff they thought might be important. So I tried to buy a paper shredder because all of that paperwork contained names phone numbers addresses and some credit card details.

    Unfortunately I had to use petty cash but the petty cash came from in store sales and we were a mostly online business and the cash had to be used for gas for our delivery drivers so I had to get owner to drop off some cash for me to use. He stalled for three months til finally I bought my shredder from home and it was tiny. It could not shred more than 3 sheets at a time and only worked for 10-15 minutes at a time. It took me A YEAR to shred it all and that was with 4 people shredding it. Now everything is mostly digital and they only thing I keep on file is any receipts for things bought with petty cash (he also this year finally switch to using a card for petty cash)

    Reply ↓
    1. Filthy Vulgar Mercenary*

      Your shredder story has got to be some villain origin or hero arc or some kind of story… this is just too much. Were you transformed in some way? I think I would have to have been.

      Reply ↓
  40. DivergentStitches*

    This is just one guy, not the whole company.

    General Manager of a software engineering company. Used to be a chemical engineer 30+ years ago, is now in his 60’s.

    GM’s way of staying organized is to print every email. He has a system of file folders in a holder, one for each day of the month. When he has to follow up on an email, he puts the printout in that day’s folder.

    GM didn’t like that I kept all of my info saved in Outlook and highly recommended I adopt his system. I tried.

    He also insisted that phone was the ONLY acceptable way to try to recruit software engineers. Who never answer their phones. But when HE was an engineer, he LOVED getting phone calls from recruiters and he’d chat with them all day long and he loved building relationships with them.

    He also couldn’t handle it when I’d be alt-tabbing while sharing my screen, and made me stay on the same screen the whole time. But then fired me for not being able to multi-task.

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  41. Cheese*

    When I started at my current job, we had an in person meeting where I was told “make sure you bring a calculator.” I had my laptop (on Wifi) and my phone that would suffice for any math we’d be doing. I was still told to bring a calculator, as “everyone else will be bringing theirs.”

    These are people that use Excel FREQUENTLY but still somehow feel like typing things by hand into a very basic calculator is necessary!

    Reply ↓
    1. SarahKay*

      I mean, I love Excel and use it all the time, but sometimes a basic calculator (with nice big buttons) is just handy to do a very quick cross-check. That said, while I absolutely do keep it handy at my desk, I do NOT take it into in-person meeting. It’s useful, not vital.

      Reply ↓
  42. I'm great at doing stuff*

    I love the idea of Jim being the keeper of the server secret for years. He probably enjoyed it as a little break.

    Reply ↓
    1. Spicy Tuna*

      I worked at a small branch office of a major Fortune 500 company. It wasn’t necessary to have IT or HR at each branch office, so these functions were handled at HQ. One lucky person was designated at each branch to handle updates to the servers or outages. I was that person at our office. The IT department at HQ was great about sending detailed instructions or walking me though things over the phone. I hated my job there and having the ability to disappear into the server room periodically was the best part about it!

      Reply ↓
      1. Quill*

        Not gonna lie I became the IT person at a past, horrifying, tiny startup job just so I had an excuse to not talk to people / put out fires for half an hour whenever the printer went down.

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    2. Turtlewings*

      Either that, or he lived in a state of resigned exasperation, because he’d tried over and over to explain to his coworkers that *all they had to do was unplug it and plug it back in*, but no one wanted to hear it. He was Magic Jim the Server Whisperer and that was that.

      Reply ↓
  43. CommanderBanana*

    Reading this gave me (metaphorical) full-body hives. Workplaces have got to stop tap-dancing around people like this.

    Reply ↓
  44. Spicy Tuna*

    I worked for a medium sized public company. They changed payroll software, and paying appropriate payroll taxes to the IRS required one additional step than the old software required. The payroll person just refused to do it. Payroll taxes weren’t getting paid. When the IRS sent notices about it, she tossed them in the trash. Finally, a representative from the IRS showed up at our offices. The CEO was APOPLECTIC!! Payroll person was fired on the spot. Company had to pay a $1 million fine in addition to all of the missing payroll taxes.

    Reply ↓
    1. Orv*

      WOW. That’s insane. Payroll taxes are one of those things that the IRS cracks down on *hard*. Like, “you’ll be wearing bracelets that connect” hard.

      Reply ↓
  45. Thomas*

    I’m told that staff in one department will print documents received by email, scan them into another computer system, and immediately shred the printout.

    Reply ↓
  46. Very Tired Product Minion*

    I missed the original post, but I’m in the middle of gathering evidence to once again plead our case for a PIM/DAM software (product information management/digital asset management). Right now we’re working from shared servers, with product info scattered between about six or seven folder warrens with no single spot for truly final product information. Need to find the results of a comparative product test that happened four years ago? Well, that might be in the Product Information folder, or On Hold, or Samples, or Competitor, maybe Testing, or someone’s personal folder, or… yeah, it’s not good. I spent half an hour last week chasing down a particular dimension because the website, product fact sheet, QA sheet, and packaging all had different numbers. I wound up finding one and measuring it myself. It was a different set of dimensions than all four other places. For us it’s very much a budget thing, company grew very fast and the owners are reluctant to invest in the needed tools.

    Right now I’m guilty of creating a spiraling Excel sheet that’s gonna become someone else’s nightmare when I go. But there is zero way we’ll get anything more effective right now, so it’s better than nothing.

    Reply ↓
  47. aebhel*

    I’m a public librarian in charge of collection development. When I started my job, there was a clerk who was in charge of actually purchasing the materials I selected (I assume a holdover from an era when this was more involved than just making a cart on Baker & Taylor). The process, which I could not get her to deviate from at all, was that I would make my selections, pass them on to her, and she would type every single item up on a catalog card with a typewriter before entering it into the system. This was in 2013. We had not used a card catalog in at least a decade.

    She finally retired in 2019 and I was able to get rid of the typewriter and switch over to a shared spreadsheet for tracking orders.

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  48. Red era*

    The more I read these, the more I’m like, “that guy who wrote about bullshit jobs really was onto something.”

    Because honestly, I think a lot of “BS jobs” would disappear overnight if all of these examples no longer existed.

    Reply ↓
  49. Beth**

    In the mid 1990s, I spent one summer staying with a friend from college and working in her family’s business. They had almost no technology. At school I had a computer with dial up internet, but that summer it was electric typewriters, old-style electric calculators (with the paper printouts), credit card machines that took a physical copy of the card on carbon paper and, for telephones, an ACTUAL SWITCHBOARD with the cables to connect calls. it was wild.

    There were lots of staff at this company who were relatives of each other. Anyone who called another extension on the phone networ had to come through me as the receptionist. I could listen in to all the calls and was encouraged by my friend’s parents (the company owners) to do so if relatives who didn’t have an obvious business need to speak to one another were phoning each other too frequently.

    On listening, if the call didn’t seem to be work related, I was to create static on the line (easily done with the antiquated switchboard equipment) until they got tired of it and hung up.

    I did visit my friend at her office a couple of years ago and was most disappointed to find they had entered the 21st century
    No sign of the old switchboard and modern looking computers and phones had replaced them Sigh.

    Reply ↓
    1. Sparkly Librarian*

      In college I worked for a motel that had a switchboard to transfer outside calls to the various rooms. The office did not have voicemail, an answering machine, or Internet service. We could accept credit cards, but needed to type the numbers into the payment processor and take a manual carbon copy. This was 2004 in a college town with heavy tourism — not some backwater joint! The college across the street had a well-trafficked computer lab, and all students had their school email addresses, but this business didn’t even have a contact email for reservations.

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  50. berturt*

    I’m pretty sure I’ve been present for the birth of one of these nonsensical processes at my current company within the last 2 years. We deal with a lot of data, and, quite reasonably, from a 10,000 foot view, there’s a desire to get everything compiled into one place. However, the implementation has been an unmitigated disaster:
    – Led by someone who doesn’t know this side of the business (and surprise surprise, a favorite of someone in senior management)
    – A web-based tool that is unintuitive, frustrating, and slow to use
    – Incomplete data being gathered & overly concerned with matters that are unimportant (eg space provided for length of each llama hoof trimmed, but no space provided for time spent on each llama)
    – When the people who know about the llama-grooming & are on the ground point out the issues that are immediately obvious to llama-groomers, told ‘thank you for your input, we’ll take it under advisement’. So far, no changes apparent.
    – And the worst, this data gathering process is going to be inserted in the middle of a process that works perfectly fine now, making that entire process a future nightmare.

    At the end of the day, this software has recreated software WE ALREADY HAVE, and does it 100 times worse.

    I’m fairly certain this garbage process will be ongoing years down the road and nobody will understand why we have this extra garbage step when we have perfectly serviceable software.

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  53. NotDeadLanguage*

    Not exactly a dead language. I live in an English-speaking country. A former colleague, who died suddenly, had been keeping notes in a foreign language that none of us understand. After his death, no one knew how he carried out the task so IT access his notes. We then realized how he felt right at home to keep all the notes in the foreign language.

    We then did some intelligent guesses and established new procedure to carry out the tasks. In addition, an area of expertise would have no less than two people (see “bus factor”).

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  54. Livia, Empress of Rome*

    Please, WHICH dead language? Latin? Greek? Sumerian? Hieroglyphics? The Classicist in me is perishing of curiosity!

    Reply ↓
  55. NauticalByNature*

    I came here to determine the proportion of these particular stories that were from colleges and adjacent types of organizations. Yep.

    Reply ↓
  56. HiddenT*

    I posted about my current job on the original post asking for these stories, but my previous job was worse in some ways. The owner had bought the company from her own mother about a decade before I started (I started in 2019) and “modernized” it from the old system which hadn’t used a single computer. When I started I was instructed to make sure to print out *everything* for the paper files, and also to print out and then re-scan every client file to convert it to a PDF. I asked in a confused way why they didn’t just save the Word files as PDFs. My boss (who wasn’t even that old, like maybe early 50s at that time) was *shocked* that was possible.

    Every time I tried to convince her to let me change an aspect of the system, she would drag her feet and eventually refuse (she was incredibly wishy-washy on top of being a luddite, I think she has extreme untreated anxiety), until after a couple years I realized that since she had almost nothing to do with what I did on a day to day basis (and I was a department of one in a business where she only had two employees), I could just change the system and not tell her until she asked and then say “oh I’ve been doing it that way for the last eight months” and since she couldn’t admit she hadn’t noticed and obviously nothing had gone wrong, she would just have to accept it.

    Reply ↓

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