people love to digitize things. put it on the computer, do it with a computer... arghh! not everything needs a computer.
for instance we have some shared NMR machines here. the previous system was sign up for a time on a piece of paper next to a machine. now it is digital. i suppose a good idea because people can sign up for times without actually being at the machine. but not really needed. today i thought i signed up for a machine at 11am. apparently i signed up for another machine. so the "instrument director" (read: i want an important title since i am not yet a professor with tenure) came down and told me to sign up for the time i was using. i thought i had. he figured out i signed up for the wrong machine. question 1. why didn't the person whose time i had taken actually talk to me instead of just complaining about it to other people? i would have said, oh sorry i guess i screwed up. here use the machine now, i'll go figure out when it is free again. question 2. if he really directs the place shouldn't he have looked at the schedule and figured out what was going on before he talked to me? don't just run around with horns of accusation. be a manager, duh.
advantages of a paper system for this case:
1. you know what machine you are signing up for since the paper is right next to the machine
2. if the intranet goes down, who stinkin' cares
3. you don't have to remember another stupid password that isn't even remotely secure since you put it on a piece of paper in your desk
4. once can always verify the state of the sign up by just glancing at it while at the machine
5. data entry is easy (i have had problems with entering the times on the "on-line" system, annoying that you have to click the times instead of just typing them in.... ahh i dream of dos, sadly)
6. it worked well before why fix it?
2 comments:
this sounds very similar to how we 'book a conference room resource' at work. in outlook you have to include the conference room as a RESOURCE and not an antendee, if you screw up you'll never know until about 50 people congregate outside of your conference room and the dull ray of reality will tell you that you screwed up and didn't book it as a RESOURCE. you then evacuate your meeting, let the real people in and look like a complete idiot. with the conference rooms, I'm not sure I could come up with a good solution taht wasnt digital. I'm just saying our digital solutions seems to suffer from the same ailment as yours. how about you name the machines
big tom
little harry
medium dick
(after the 3 tunnels from the good WWII movie where they had to dig out of camp)
that way people know what machine they are signing up for!
on a similar frusteration, it's people that insist on calling me when a simple email would do that drives me freaking crazy.
yes. i know a package has been delivered by UPS and is at the front desk for me. I'm in the middle of something. thankyou. -click.
how many of these conversations could be avoided with people simply using the appropriate technology for the given situation?
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