September 4, 2002
Dear Everyone:
I spent all of last week in “Hobby”, one of
The first two days (and the original reason for my going to “Hobby”) were spent at an electronic records conference sponsored by the “Hobby” chapter of ARMA (Association of Records Managers and Administrators). This is an annual event and my supervisor thought it would be a good idea for me to attend. It says something about my time in records management that I actually recognized the name of one of the presenters, and saw people that I know at the event.
Particularly when you take into account the fact that I was the only Company employee at the conference. This surprised me a bit until later in the week, when I came to realize just how much work needs to be done in records management in the company offices in “Hobby”.
Originally, I was going to attend the conference, but stay until the day after the conference to visit some new clients that I have acquired in “Hobby”. But then my supervisor contacted me and asked that I stay until Friday to help a co-worker with some interviews that she was going to be doing in “Hobby” that week. Fine.
However, by Wednesday, those interviews hadn’t been set up yet, probably due to scheduling conflicts. It was, after all, the last week before Labor Day and quite a few people may have had vacation plans. Nevertheless, I wound up assisting a different person on a different set of interviews, but which was still part of the overall study that was beginning to take place.
You see, it turns out that That Other Company that we merged with barely a year ago, had a very tight rein on inactive records in the company warehouse. But when it came to active records, apparently it was Every Man For Himself. There were no guidelines and certainly no centralized file areas such as we had at (formerly) Company. People didn’t even know that there was a company-wide retention schedule on the Intranet that would tell them how long to keep their records.
What does that mean for us in BRES (“Broadly & Really Expensive Services”)? For the time being it means easy pickings and lots of low-hanging fruit. Now that the word is out that there are people who actually know how to set up and maintain centralized file areas, the requests are beginning to pour in. And a particularly ripe plum is the recently formed Company “Overseas Supplies”, affectionately known as COP.
They are now my customer.
And while the operations in
And who knows? I may even get to know my way around “Hobby”, a city whose roadways seem predicated on the concept of “you can’t get there from here”. We’ll see.
In the meantime, I’m home for the next two weeks before heading off to the famous Managing Electronic Records (MER) conference the last week in September. Here’s hoping “Jeannie” and I can get to a movie or two, now that the dog days of August are officially over.
Love, as always,
Pete
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