Just a few years ago (only 5 years ago), I was a CTO in a global logistics company. Now, the logistics biz isn’t an industry where you can do your job if your PC isn’t working. You can’t just pull out paper and a pen and get anything at all done. 95% of the job is purely electronic.
The remaining 5% generated a heck of a lot of paper, though. While everyone could send and receive all manner of documents by email nearly instantly, almost every one of those documents needed to be resent … by fax.
You’d think that emailing a scan of a document, or a file that was a software-generated document would be simple, right?
Well, it bloody well isn’t.
What did we get?
We got TIFF files (single page, multi-page, and bizarrely concatenated end-to-end), we got PCX files (ditto), we got BMPs and PDFs, and Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel files. We got pages of documents encoded as videos.
We got documents unintentionally password-protected, empty attachments, self-extracting executables, all-black images, all-white images, truncated images, images that were scrunched down to illegibility, files that were infected with malware.
We got GIFs and RAWs and PPMs and PNMs and TGAs, and sometimes a holiday photo from someone’s collection instead of the document that was supposed to be there.
And half the time – for whatever reason – they never arrived at all.
When someone got an email with documents attached it was a matter for groaning and despair. The staff could never predict what hoops they would have to jump through to get them to the point where they could actually read the documents. And really, they didn’t want to know.
They just wanted it to work and never really quite grasped why a corrupted file in a bizarrely unusual format needed one piece of software or another, and why it choked with an error message.
And really, they weren’t all that much better at sending them either. Probably most of the attachments sent were empty, or blank (scanned the wrong side), or some other document that shouldn’t have been sent, or just plain sent to the wrong address. At least we didn’t send out any malware.
And this was after years of training and practice.
Eventually, the staff settled into a routine. If the document didn’t open first time, with whatever was configured as the default (and that was nearly all of them), they’d just send an email back and ask for the document to be faxed.
I’m told that things haven’t gotten any better in this regard since I threw in the towel. So, that’s still how it is happening.
You might think that it is an unusual situation, but it isn’t. To some degree or another, these technology problems are pandemic.
You and me? We don’t have any real troubles with sending and receiving emails. We’re the exception, and not the rule. For most people, the process is an adventure and not necessarily all that pleasant an adventure.
Given the option, probably half (actually, it’s probably more than half) of the people in the world wish they could never look at a PC again, and loathe the notion of being forced to use one in the office.
You and me? We’re in the other half.
I feel lucky to be in the half that I’m in. If you’re in our half (and face it, you probably are) the problem is difficult to even wrap your head around.
I don’t have any ideas about how to make technology and software more usable for the half that has trouble. Obviously Microsoft Bob is not the answer. Dumbing things down beyond a certain point is just counterproductive and makes things worse for everyone.
If it’s a socio-cultural problem (and there’s every evidence that it probably is), then we’re really looking at another two or three generations before most of us start to feel comfortable with the stuff that the rest of us take for-granted, and even write-off as ‘old hat’.
| Just a few years ago (only 5 years ago), I was a CTO in a global logistics company. Now, the logistics biz isn’t an industry where you can do your job if your PC isn’t working. You can’t just pull out paper and a pen and get anything at all done. 95% of the job is purely electronic.
The remaining 5% generated a heck of a lot of paper, though. While everyone could send and receive all manner of documents by email nearly instantly, almost every one of those documents needed to be resent … by fax.
You’d think that emailing a scan of a document, or a file that was a software-generated document would be simple, right?
Well, it bloody well isn’t.
What did we get?
We got TIFF files (single page, multi-page, and bizarrely concatenated end-to-end), we got PCX files (ditto), we got BMPs and PDFs, and Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel files. We got pages of documents encoded as videos.
We got documents unintentionally password-protected, empty attachments, self-extracting executables, all-black images, all-white images, truncated images, images that were scrunched down to illegibility, files that were infected with malware.
We got GIFs and RAWs and PPMs and PNMs and TGAs, and sometimes a holiday photo from someone’s collection instead of the document that was supposed to be there.
And half the time – for whatever reason – they never arrived at all.
When someone got an email with documents attached it was a matter for groaning and despair. The staff could never predict what hoops they would have to jump through to get them to the point where they could actually read the documents. And really, they didn’t want to know.
They just wanted it to work and never really quite grasped why a corrupted file in a bizarrely unusual format needed one piece of software or another, and why it choked with an error message.
And really, they weren’t all that much better at sending them either. Probably most of the attachments sent were empty, or blank (scanned the wrong side), or some other document that shouldn’t have been sent, or just plain sent to the wrong address. At least we didn’t send out any malware.
And this was after years of training and practice.
Eventually, the staff settled into a routine. If the document didn’t open first time, with whatever was configured as the default (and that was nearly all of them), they’d just send an email back and ask for the document to be faxed.
I’m told that things haven’t gotten any better in this regard since I threw in the towel. So, that’s still how it is happening.
You might think that it is an unusual situation, but it isn’t. To some degree or another, these technology problems are pandemic.
You and me? We don’t have any real troubles with sending and receiving emails. We’re the exception, and not the rule. For most people, the process is an adventure and not necessarily all that pleasant an adventure.
Given the option, probably half (actually, it’s probably more than half) of the people in the world wish they could never look at a PC again, and loathe the notion of being forced to use one in the office.
You and me? We’re in the other half.
I feel lucky to be in the half that I’m in. If you're in our half (and face it, you probably are) the problem is difficult to even wrap your head around.
I don’t have any ideas about how to make technology and software more usable for the half that has trouble. Obviously Microsoft Bob is not the answer. Dumbing things down beyond a certain point is just counterproductive and makes things worse for everyone.
If it’s a socio-cultural problem (and there’s every evidence that it probably is), then we’re really looking at another two or three generations before most of us start to feel comfortable with the stuff that the rest of us take for-granted, and even write-off as ‘old hat’. | |  | |
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An interesting shift, Mary and Linda have second lives
This is hilarious to me now. We have our printers at work now which resolutely refuse for any reason to fax to multiple locations. Each office has a note on the machine detailing which clinic, specialist, office, agency, etc that that machine refuses to fax to – some even refuse to fax to entire cities.
So we use the printer to scan the documents into email, emailing to ourselves and then forward the document as an email attachment – because it is easier!!
Well, ok – several of us do that and walk the others through the process
youve picked the wrong SIDE…. in a few generations your side will have caused so much havoc, that you’all be back to ink and horses.
dr. who. time traveler.
I have stumbled on this problem previously.
Then I thought about how people treat the tools of the job they love. How pedantic can they be about that. How little fun it is to fill out a form.
I can’t really blame people for not caring about the ways of doing things they hate to do.
There’s probably a case to be made for dumbing things down, though. And for taking the matter of formats and encodings out of the hands of the end users. It’s ridiculous that there are a few dozen formats for sending images via the net, and probably several thousand image format conversion packages out there. And for taking the choice of software out of the hands of office/commercial users, too. Microsoft probably had the right idea there. Much as I dislike the monopoly approach.
As a system and network admin (read: “nazi!”) for a long time now, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s more like 99% of users that are that “probably half” that you mention. I long ago used every tool at my disposal to lock PCs down to ONE set of tools, and really got quite anti when someone asked about a tool that “did task B better than that crap Software X we’re using…” The point was that IT WORKED. The applications were interoperable, the formats were interoperable, and we managed to talk to our scattered offices all over the world, and to our customers, suppliers, and transport/logistics people.
So in that way I’m definitely a convert to a unilateral dictatorial monopoly. Sue me… %)
@funny: You think that isn’t precisely what’s already happened?
@teddleruss : and I thought it was just me:) Worst culprits? Middle management. Best? senior management (if you give them toys to play with at the next peeing contest or whatever they do when they have conclaves) and the average Jill Workunit who just wants to get the job done. I shook my head silently when the number of freshmeat all-accredited fodder came into the tek/support arena but at least they had a certain mindset you could use to steer them. The real world soon knocked off the sillier conceptions. I dont like Chairman (well guess we need another name now) Bills approach but have to admit that if I was still in the biz of spec writing and enforcement for users I would insist (read – my way or the highway) on a nice basic Redmond suite, with the occaisional addition of something more specialized. Face it, email, word, excel. a browser is all they need. As for the creatives they come ready formed with basically the three or four biggies plus funky 3D design 8th level mage capabilities and generally help each other out. Delight to work with really. Double bonus as I dont know how to work them beyond they need xyz hardware.
I was running an office once, and I replaced the paper based fax machine with a fax modem, and had it all set up very simply.
Incoming faxes go to a joint mailbox, and the owner can just drag it into their Outlook.
Outgoing faxes from Word or any software, you could just print to the Fax machine, and it would bring up an address book or a box to enter the phone number. Press Send and you would get an emali to say sent or not sent.
If you have a paper document, you just go to the scanner, press FAX, then the phone number and it will scan it and then send it via the Modem.
I thought this was easy enough, but no, after I left they just bought a plain paper fax.