More lousy software and the work - arounds it causes.
Several years ago the organisation I work in (not for much longer) got away from paper case files and replaced them with computer files. Most of the documents are in pdf form and the most important ones can be very long, anything from 10 pages to 400 plus, typically 80 to 120. These documents contain a lot of repetitious padding that is all but irrelevant to us, but also contain technical terms such as chemical and drug names and the multitude of synonyms they have. We need to find these names pretty damn quick since the management keeps on raising the required work rate.

There are about 200 people using this system on a nearly daily basis. While the system was being discussed and developed ten years ago, the potential users kept on asking for the ability to text search these large documents. This was ignored.

At the same time the users have to compare the pdf document with one to a dozen other documents of similar size downloaded from a source that uses a different file type called cpc. There is a text searchable version of this but of course it is more expensive and so the el cheapo non - searchable version was selected, again despite requests for text searchable versions.

While it is possible to text search pdf documents for particular words, the version in the main system cannot be searched. This leads to users either downloading versions of the main document from the net in pdf or other form or digging the document out of the case file and running an optical character recognition on it.

The storage and money savings made on el cheapo cpc versions are lost because the users ignore the cpc versions and obtain text searchable pdf versions and save them in the same folders, probably tripling the storage needed.

In answer to a chorus of complaint from the users, management's reply was that the system "met 95% of our business needs".

Bullshit.
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Thu 17 Jun 2010, 11:50, Reply)