Missing the Point

A comment in an e-mail this morning reminded me of messages we used to get at work from someone in upper management. This person would write a memo on a word processor, print it out, scan the printout into a JPEG file, then attach that to a blank e-mail. He never actually put what the message was about in the Subject field, since the memo itself had a Subject. (We were specifically warned against opening e-mails with attachments, especially if there were suspicious elements, such as no actual message - just a blank e-mail with nothing in the body and an attached file - and vague subjects.)

Now, the old procedure was to write a memo and have a secretary type it up in the proper format, make copies and mail them around. The new method was to e-mail the memo to a secretary for the electronic version of the process. I suspect this guy wanted to do it all himself to demonstrate his technical competency. Only he had never actually paid attention to what e-mail memos look like.

He wouldn't even clean the platen before scanning. So the memos were sometimes hard to read.