May 14, 2021
Dear Everyone:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) came out with a new “guideline” this week for persons who have
been vaccinated, indicating that it is no longer necessary to wear masks
under “certain conditions”.
Frankly, it’s simpler to just keep a mask close by and slip it on
whenever going out than to try and navigate the new “rules”.
We’ll wait to see what the state and county have to say about it.
Sometimes “Alice” joins us by phone while
driving great distances for work.
And every so often “Jeannie” finishes with a job at work just in
time to connect for a short while.
This week, she told us, briefly, about a person who was seeking
worker’s compensation for some unspecified injury sustained while
working as a “records clerk”.
However, the person was quick to point out, he didn’t deal with
“paper records”, which could involve lifting heavy boxes filled with
folders and papers.
Back when I was working, the Company would
occasionally post a job opening for a worker in the warehouse where
hundreds of thousands of boxes were maintained in “offsite storage”.
The job description always ended with “…must be able to lift 45
pounds…”
This person only dealt with “electronic”
records. Which could mean
documents kept in a centralized digital storage system.
One can only wonder how exacting this job might have been that
the “injured” party expected to be paid to refrain from such activity
for the rest of his life.
Many companies seem to be getting away from
worrying about paper records in favor of digitizing everything and just
throwing it all into a central file server.
No need for “records clerks” of any type.
Just let people file things where they think they should go and
leave it at that.
After all, how hard can it be to find a
specific document among possibly millions of others?
Ever have a sock disappear in the laundry?
And you know what that sock looks like.
What if you’re trying to locate a document filed by someone else?
Jack:
“Hey, Jill. Where did
you put that document? And
what did you call it?”
Jill:
“I put it in ‘The Cloud’.
And I named it something like, ‘Over the Hill’.”
True Story:
I once was assigned to help a group of Engineers who were trying
to make some sense of their “Shared Drive”, a euphemism for assigned
space on a specialized computer called a file server.
We had a very clever assistant who could create a listing of
every file on their Shared Drive in the form of a spreadsheet.
Each level of files came out as a new column.
It doesn’t really matter what it looked like.
The important thing is that it listed absolutely every file
belonging to this Department.
It quickly became apparent that everyone had different ideas
about what should go where.
It also became apparent that there was
something called “4 Barrels” that was very important to these people.
I still have no idea what “4 Barrels” referred to.
It could have been a specialized piece of equipment.
Or possibly a location somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.
Again, it doesn’t really matter.
What mattered was how many different ways these
people found to spell “4 Barrels”.
There were:
“4”, “For”, “Four”, “Fore“, and (my personal favorite) Roman
Numeral, “IV”.
As for “Barrels”:
That could be spelled “Barels”, “Barells”, “Barrels”, “Barrells”,
and “bbls”. That last is the
“official” abbreviation for “Barrels” used by the energy industry.
Legend has it that back when John D. Rockefeller was
standardizing on barrel capacity, with his company, Standard Oil, the
“best” petroleum was shipped in barrels that were colored blue.
Hence, management always wanted to know how many “blue barrels”
there were in a shipment. Or
maybe not.
The point is, even if you know how to use the
“Search” function, finding documents with the term “4 Barrels” would
require about two dozen separate keyword combinations to find them all.
Assuming the term actually appeared on or in a document.
Good luck with that.
In the meantime, try to give your documents
meaningful names. And just
wear a mask until the “All Clear” is clearly declared.
Love, as always,
Pete
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