An administrative oversight

After I'd been in the computer industry a few years I was charged with the task of finding out what my customers needed to support their production processes so I began to ask them.

On one occasion I was in a production control office talking to the admin guy who printed and distributed the works order sets (everything was on paper). Each set consisted of half a dozen or so different coloured foolscap pages: white, yellow, green, blue - each colour went to a different function - and two pink copies. "Why two pink?" I asked. "One is for stock control and I keep one for audit" came the reply, and was shown a cupboard the size of a large wardrobe full of pink sheets. "What happens to them?", I asked. Answer came there none.

I smelled a rat and began to ask around. It emerged that, 15 years before, the company had carried out a contract for, let us say, the New Zealand navy, who had picked up the sheets every few weeks. The contract had finished after a few months but nobody bothered to tell the admin guy, so he'd carried on printing them.

At the time, too many computer systems unquestioningly automated the existing manual systems enabling people, as it was said, "... to make the same mistakes but much more efficiently."