FRIDAY SURPRISE: Not my type.

Friday, October 30, 2009 Filed in: Friday Surprise!, Completely irrelevant

Some years back I had a job that required me to interface on a daily basis with a local governmental body. There was a form they required us to fill out and mail to them; a form with an odd dimension. I've forgotten the exact measurements, but it wasn't a full 8.5x11, or a half-sheet, or even a quarter-sheet. It wasn't one of the common postcard sizes, either - it was a completely custom size on 3-part NCR paper.

At one point I was writing a piece of software to automate the process of gathering the information and filling out the form. I really wanted to submit the data electronically, but that wasn't an option. The second best choice would have been to simply print the information on an 8.5x11 sheet. No, they insisted, it had to be the same form factor as the handwritten form.

WTH??

Using all the diplomacy I could muster I tried for weeks to negotiate a compromise. I asked time and again why we needed to use THAT specific form size, and all I could get out of them was "that's what we use." Why, I wanted to know, couldn't they use something else, something more common and less costly?

I finally got one of their people to spill the beans: the reason for this odd form size was because, many years ago (decades, actually), the office now occupied by this agency acquired a little filing cabinet whose original purpose was unknown. The cabinet's drawers were permanently configured for this odd paper size.

At some point the office was vacated, but the strange cabinet remained behind. After several such occupant shuffles, this agency moved into the space and there was that cabinet! It was pressed into use for this form, and that was the end of the discussion.

Our company was being dictated to by an orphaned filing cabinet older than its users, and the situation was unlikely to change because "that's the way we've always done it."

I read this story about the NYPD and had a flashback.

-=[ Grant ]=-

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