Further to my post below
The company that my mate Adam was drafted into seemed to attract a certain level of thickness to work there. He tells me as the business became more successful, they took on another guy to be office manager. First though, a bit of background.

I was roped in to create a small extranet thing. Because the workforce comprised of welders and people who operate lifting gear and scissorlifts etc, they keep a record of all their competency certificates and welding qualifications on file. When welders were sent to a job, the site manager for the client would want access to these so we devised an online alternative to faxing them to places.
On the extranet, a job would be created and welders assigned to that job. Then the site manager at the other end could log in and see a list of the welders on the job, and then be able to view scanned in versions of the certificates and qualifications. So far so paper-free-office.

The office manager, we shall call Mel (because I cannot remember his real name) had the task of managing this extranet. Even though Adam explained it several times, with reassuring nods, ahhs and the occasional 'I see', he couldn't get his head around the benefits of such a system. Adam informed me that a year or so later, he checked the database of the extranet and noticed that new jobs hadn't been created for about 9 months and the only activity was the occasional log in by Mel.

What had transpired was that Mel had eschewed a perfectly good system for his own. Rather than create the jobs, assign welders and set up the log in for the site manager, he created one job and assigned all the staff to it. Then when a site manager wanted the qualifications, Mel would log in and go through each welder in turn who was on that job, print out each scanned in qualification/certificate and fax it to them, even though the originals were kept in a filing cabinet NEXT TO THE FUCKING FAX MACHINE!

I don't know how Adam can be so impervious to it all. I'd be worried in case such a level of docility was contagious
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 10:34, 1 reply)

I've got photocopies of offshore certificates that I have photocopied
as I can't have the fax doc feeder chew the originals up, which it has been known to do.
( M3rx likes the Asian ladies, Fri 4 Mar 2011, 12:12, closed)