John Quiggin on 'The myth of "The Myth of the Paperless Office"'

[mmcirvin]

After a long increase, office paper use is starting to decline. (Quiggin also explains why this does not at all invalidate the lessons of the actual book "The Myth of the Paperless Office").

I think I first noticed this in the contexts of academic publishing and job searching. For years I did have a cubicle piled high with vast stacks of paper, but it was because I was making software for office printers. Sometimes particularly gnarly bugs would produce op art of quality suitable for wall display.

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I've got a local dentist who, according to my coworker who visited him, has a 100% paperless office-- even does without radiographs; the X-ray images are captured using some computery technique, though it still involves putting those uncomfortable folded doohickeys in your mouth, but the results are much faster than the old emulsion development process.

Presumably he has a paper prescription pad in case he needs to prescribe something stronger than floss, and while dental records are digitized, I have little doubt that he must encounter paper records.

Despite all this, his rates must be reasonable because my dental plan covers it fully, and it pays an average calculated over the zip code, which in this case covers substantially an urban residential area.

[thette.livejournal.com]

There are electronic prescription tools.

Of course, they're easier to use here, because we have a standard prescription form and a pharmaceutical monopoly, but I'm sure there are American versions, too.

[piehead.livejournal.com]

I use almost no paper at work. Or rather, computer paper. I always have a paper journal and pen at hand.

We all have to turn in timesheets every week, even though we're salaried, because the different projects we work on have to be accounted to the right budgets. So that's 1 sheet, because apparently just sending in the .XLS files isn't official enough.

Other than that, I print out the occasional code listing if it's just too long and gross to see on screen and I'm trying to redo it. At which point I lament the death of fan-fold paper. Code listings as single sheets out of a laser printer is just wrong.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Huh. Back when I had to do timesheets for the same reason, we had a web interface.

I printed out 132-column green-bar fanfold code listings a lot when I was at NCAR around 1986 and '87, and my main coding display was a VT220 (I actually had access to big displays with resolution as high as 1280x1024, but they were scarce resources used for visualization output).

After that, we started switching over to DECstations that all had their own big color displays, providing something more like the modern coder experience, and I hardly ever did that any more, though it still came in handy on occasion.

I have the same feeling of wrongness you do about printing out code listings on an office laser. Fanfold is kind of like a vertical paper scroll, which lends itself naturally to code, and standard office sheets (whether 8.5"x11" or A4) are too narrow.

[piehead.livejournal.com]

If the labels on the boxes are to be believed, we have (paper) time card archives going back to at least 1997, which is the earliest date I can see through the door of one of the finance department's closet.

We need to have our sheets countersigned by our manager (for whatever reason)... so I guess doing electronic sheets was put on hold for this reason.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Though some people mention it as a formerly common phenomenon, the notion of printing out and filing all your e-mail is utterly alien to me.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

There were a very few people in the office who do it, and not all their email, but important CYA emails, mainly.

[asienieizi.livejournal.com]

When I worked at the bank _all_ corporate email was printed out , each employee had to initial that they'd read it, _then_ it was filed.
Crazy.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I see Brooks Moses added an interesting comment that the flattening of the curve may be entirely because of the widespread introduction of printers that can print double-sided! I'm not so sure, since it seems to me that a large amount of office printing at one time consisted of documents with only one page, and besides, big office copiers could generally duplex earlier than that.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...and even though I worked on printers and knew what a duplex unit was, I still have to do a mental double-take when I hear people talking about "duplex" to mean two-sided printing, because the first thing I think of is still "half-duplex/full-duplex" in the context of early modems and terminals, when it referred to whether the remote end was echoing input or if the terminal should do it locally.

[megmimcg.livejournal.com]

I fear that my office is far from paperless. Hard copy drawings and documents are still the legal standard when it comes to the design and construction industry. This is bound to change to some degree in the next few decades but that the moment everything still gets printed out, even if it is prepared digitally.

Also

[asienieizi.livejournal.com]

I meant to mention I recently had the opportunity to search for a nice pen and pencil set for a college graduate. I say search because a trip to several gift stores, stationery stores, office stores and two department stores revealed absolutely _nothing_. I'm thinking because people don't write anymore? It was truly weird though as I can remember finding them easily in the past.