Book Board Chat

I think that's true, Jim, kids share tricks with each other (of course maybe their minds are more nimble than ours?) and progress faster. When I worked for the city of NY, my boss was head of the Medicaid program and she threw me into the pond (word processing) without any training! One day, IBM typewriter, next day - 4Phase system word processing by Motorola. That system was very simple...I was really able to zip on the keyboard and the wrap-around feature made it even faster. She had me doing RFP documents and things like that. We worked nicely with that system for a couple of years and then the powers-that-be decided to "upgrade". I was in charge of two other people and the 3 of us produced many documents for her and her two assistants. Lots of pressure, but we handled it. Then we heard that they were going to switch over to another system, which would require that we use Word Perfect (I think that was the wp program). Super. Except that none of us had ever used it, knew nothing about it and needed to be trained on this new program before we could do ANYTHING. I wrote a couple of memos to her warning her that we could not produce anything until we knew how to use this new program and begged her to insist that 4 Phase and this new thing run concurrently so that in a pinch we could change a document or get something out the door quickly. I knew that in their arrogance the computer people downstairs would simply dump the old program and that would be that. Sure enough, several of us from the agency attended 3 days of classes on the new (more involved and harder to learn) system, still didn't really know enough to use it.....and boom. Down went 4 Phase. All those documents disappeared, and we were blindsided. She flipped a hissy but to no avail. It was newer, therefore better. Luckily this was right around the time when I left the agency to move back to WY so I don't know how it all worked out. Badly, I'm sure. I have always laughed at people who said how much paper computers would save. The thing was, that everybody wanted a hard copy of everything they generated. So, MORE paper. Main reason was that once they found out they could tweak a document and we could correct it and print out a new one, they did that -- over and over and over. It got so bad nothing left the office for a couple or 3 days, simply because they had the ability to keep trying to improve something instead of getting the thing out the door. It was strange. Then the boss asked why things weren't getting out in a timely manner, and I told her. Exactly. That put a stop to most of it. But we weren't going to take the heat for someone who couldn't commit to paper. Rant over