the good old days

That’s something my employer has been promising for years. “We are committed to the idea of a paperless office, and will strive to continually improve and reduce our paper usage and requirements.”

Now that the factory is closing (in 28 days… the countdown begins!), my primary responsibility is sorting through paperwork compiled by me and previous engineers over the 30 years the plant has been open. You may be thinking, “Gosh, that’s a lot of paper,” and you’d be right. I am throwing about 3,000 sheets an hour into the recycling bin (maybe 100/hour into the “to be shredded” pile, for confidential documents). There is a satisfying KAWHUMP sound as you drop a stack that big, driving home the point that this place was never even close to paperless.

On top of the vast quantity of discarded paperwork, there’s a smaller subset that we’re required to retain for ten years in case somebody wants to sue or there’s a massive Ford recall due to something we built. This is all lawyer-related. They want to be able to cover their asses and see whether or not we accounted for as-yet-unknown problems while manufacturing car parts. So, fine, we’re sorting some of the paper into tidy stacks in boxes, and labeling them, so in ten years they can be pulled out of a warehouse and shredded THEN. Again, helps us clearly see that our office environment is not paperless, and indeed it’s so un-paperless that our paper stays around longer than we do. You can’t get less paperless than that, right?

Wrong!

This just in from our local records retention coordinator:

Only electronic files that CANNOT BE RETAINED AS A HARD COPY will be saved by our IT department. All files currently on the server or in other data bases should be retained as a hard copy and stored in Record Retention boxes according to corporate guidelines.

Corporate has declared that we need to print out every single file we have stored on the server. We’re so un-paperless we’re using more paper while we get rid of all the paper!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 11:29 am and is filed under corporate nonsense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.