All places of work have a system of folder navigation. They are, without exception, designed to make you want to kill yourself. Today, I stood over my colleague for half an hour while we watched hardcore pornography together on her computer. Sorry, wait, that’s right, we weren’t watching porn, we were looking for a document.
It took half an hour because there was only one document that we were looking for, but the folder we were looking in contained enough similarly-titled documents to contain the Arabic translation to Paradise Lost written in Times New Roman, size 36 font, on single sheets of A4, a million times over.
When she had finally located the document, insisting all the while that I loom over her in the manner of a particularly attentive stalker, I suggested:
‘Tell you what, now that we’ve found it, and hurrah for us by the way, why don’t I just file it into a ‘Master’ folder, so that the next time its needed we can locate it more easily. Because all of these other documents are just old versions of this one, right?’
She looked up at me, her face a recognisable mixture of apathetic disinterest and resentment. I began my usual round of apologetic prattle, but I think that the damage had already been done. I could see now that I had offended her deeply. What I had mistaken for me being helpful, albeit in an especially pedantic and anally retentive fashion, was in fact just a slur on her organizational skills, and probably also on the Belgians as a nation. So often I find that what is intended as me doing my job turns out, actually, to be me insulting the Belgians. And what a surprisingly racist individual I have suddenly revealed myself to be.
‘What’, she replied ‘what means zis ‘Master’?’
‘It means: here is the document that you are looking for’
‘We don know ‘Master’?’
‘No. Well…I can call the folder whatever you want, we can even just ignore the separate folder idea altogether and just label the document with the date that it was last amended, or we can rename the document as 'XXX new’.
‘But we find it now’
‘Well yes, yes we did find it. But we will need to access this particular document on a regular basis, and it just makes it more easy to find it ON A REGULAR BASIS if we put an identifier on it so that we don’t have to trawl through all of these old versions again’
‘But zis was izy to find: I sink zat we don need to chenj it becawz ze document is called what we are looking for’
‘I hear what you ‘re saying, but, um, its taken us half an hour to find it, right, because all of the old version are called by the same name’
‘But look urr, we can see wen ze document az been chenj, so we know which is ze one we want’
‘Yes, but now that you have opened it, the date has changed again. So every time we look through these documents to find this one’ - and by this point I could see this happening rather a lot - ‘the date changes to say that the document has been modified, you see?’
‘I don sink zat we need to chenj’
‘Right’
I decided at that point that I had spent quite enough time debating the relative merits of folder organisation, and that I didn’t really give enough of a shit to impose my new world order (of folders) upon the Belgians. It did leave me thinking, though: how does she organize her pornography?
That's so funny! because I too started a blog yesterday. Except that mine was about establishing best practice for HTML emails. But in other ways, it was similar.
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