Staples of life

DCL snapshot - the housemartins are beginning to arrive, and spend their days swooping over the meadows and lake. Participants are also arriving, for the Chi Gung Level 1 and 2 this weekend. And the frisbee has emerged from hibernation, due to the encouragement of the Personnel Manager (good for morale ;)

As I said before, working in an office is a little scary for me. This might sound strange to the many millions of people for whom office life is an everyday situation. But I left my last office job when I was eighteen, and I really thought that it was my LAST office job. As it turns out, I am quite enjoying certain aspects (after one week, so we'll see whether that lasts.)

Stapling, for example, is quite satisfying. To properly staple, of course, one needs to have collated the correct papers into a neat bundle. Then there is the satisfying Click and then you have made a single entity out of a multiple. Neat.

This is just one of the many links in the various chains of tasks which together make up office work. There are beginnings and ends to the component tasks, minor punctuations in the stream of work. At some point, a person is recruited, after numerous chains of tasks have taken place. They then have their own entry in a file, containing various stapled bundles of paper contained in a transparent plastic wallet.

Being of a certain type of mind, as I learn the systems that are in place, I continously think of how to optimise them. Especially the computer systems. I don't think it is giving away too much to say that we don't seem to have a broad IT strategy in place. Perhaps we do, but I just haven't heard about it yet. As a matter of fact, having started this blog, I found out that we already had a blog, which I didn't know about. I am considering whether it is worth switching over to that one, which might integrate better with our website.

So, for example, I look at the various documents which I work on, which often contain the same names and some of the same information, and I wonder why they are not somehow linked to the database, which, theoretically, stores all that information and is constantly updated. That kind of thing.

Of course, the more complex you make the systems, the more there is that can go wrong. Finding a balance between simple and labour-saving is a challenge. This is the kind of thing I wake up thinking about. Sad really.