Scanners

The office has a new scanner, and there was rejoicing throughout the land! actually, in real life I have scanner since it taking up counter space in my office and I'm the only one who knows how to use it and I did not rejoice. The unit has its own scanner, I have a new item for my job description.

When we first got the scanner, I liked the scanner. Mostly because it spent its first weeks boxed up outside my door because we have been trained to not touch anything that plugs in. There is an addendum to that; we also do not unbox anything without express written permission from our immediate supervisor, IT, and the vendor from which it arrived.

So I waited. And one day the guy who brings our mail made a special trip to the hallway outside my office to break open the box and manhandle the machine out so he could adhere some kind of inventory seal to it. It was like watching an OB nurse manhandle a minutes old newborn: Shocking but necessary. I knew then my scanner free peace was not going to last forever, that yes indeed someone had noticed that it was there. It was another couple of weeks before the IT person appeared to formally take the scanner out of the hallway and into it's new home in my office. She got it out of the box, plugged in its various plugs and fed my computer its software, right before she disappeared she said that some hardware geek from IT would come by and teach us how to use it.

Weeks passed. Scanner sat on my table and blinked little blinky messages of love to at me all day. Occasionally my boss would ask when the IT guy was going to be there and I repeated what out IT person had said which was “soon”. Soon as defined by several weeks. One day my boss sent me an email stating that she and a woman from upstairs who all ready had a scanner in her office were going to be at my office at four the next day to “play” with the scanner. I emailed her back and reminded her of our weekly staff meeting, she was disappointed but undeterred, she and her playmate rescheduled the office visit until the next day.

And they played with it. I played with it. We learned that it does matter which way you feed the documents in because do it the wrong way and they turn out upside down and this is bad. Stuff that is never ultinatly going to be looked at again should not be upside down! After the documents are scanned and attached to the investigation, I mail and or route to whatever division they belong to. I thought scanning was supposed to save steps? It’s not saving anything; we’re still paying to mail these things all over hither and yon. What’s the point? The "point" is, more work for me! Yea! lets waste Diana's time! She can scan, fax and mail the same document! The more copies the better!

Then why scan them in the first place? If there is a hard copy the hard copy is what will be used, it will be added to the packet and live there until it is ultimately shredded. The scanned version is just going to sit there and take up virtual space. Forever, since there is no timetable for destruction of scanned material. Since I have been scanning, my computer runs slower. The program the docs are stored in runs slower. And let’s not talk about the icky photographs – Which I know have to look at! I liked it better my only interaction with icky pictures of abused people and their various bruises, cuts, scrapes and bedsores - was just to shudder and hand them off to the people whop get paid enough to look at them. Now I still shudder and hand them off to better paid people, but now those people give them back so I can scan them. Have you ever tried to scan something without looking at it?

I hate the scanner.