Nanos wrote:I can't remember if I've told this story or not here, but once when I was working in a government department my manager was telling me that we was due to spend a morning sorting a list, by hand!
Yes, thats right, printing out a list, cutting every line into strip of paper, and then hand sorting thousands!
I gently pointed out that sticking the list into a spreadsheet and clicking sort would perform the same task in a fraction of the time...
At which point I was granted the title of IT liaison officer, so I could help point them to ways to use computers to help reduce their workload.
(At one point, they gave me 3 months of data entry work to do, upon which I came back half an hour later after finding out the data was already in the system in another place, and all I had to do was write a short script to copy it to the right place.)
It was really quite stunning how little IT training they do in government departments..
You do not have to convince me about the incompetence of government to perform the least of tasks. I've seen so much of it that I consider it remarkable when they DON'T demonstrate incompetence.
David