PAINTSQUARE BLOG

Life is great, things progress, and every day a shiny new techno-toy arrives to make our work easier … or so we are all told.

The enthusiastic cry is that we are heading for a paperless society. Offices are now (in theory) operating paperless systems. What wonderful news for trees!

How did we all manage before the advent of the personal computer and its little cousins, the cell phone and the tablet? (To me, a tablet is still that thing that the doctor prescribes, but these damn things I cannot swallow!)

Manual Labor

Computers and computer literacy are interesting concepts. As with a lot of electrical appliances, the instructions seem to have been written by a machine, so that normal human beings cannot understand them.

Interestingly, if you give one of these toys to the average 6-year-old, he or she will have it up and running in minutes without a glance at the manual (if there is a manual).

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This indicates that we now have a generation of genetic mutants who “do computers.” Will the next generation be internally Wifi-ready or at home in “the cloud”’ without the need for any hardware? The mind boggles.

Tools of the Trade

But back to “Computers v Paper” (keeping in mind that the “v” is an abbreviation of the Latin versus, meaning against, in the combative meaning of the word).

What I am banging on about is how those dueling tools relate to what most of us are doing.

Most times, people are using computers to do their paperwork and administrative duties. On the whole, this is fine for the bulk of us two-finger typists, but where it tends to fall down is when people want to try and cut corners to get things done quicker.

In the good ole BC (Before Computers) era, everything was done the hard way. Inspection forms were completed in long hand and in triplicate, using self-carbon copying pads. This ensured that each and every report was unique.

Documents would be similarly beaten out on a Remington or other tripe writer, with errors deleted by XXXXX or Snopake.

Ctrl-V for Victory

How times have changed!

The magic of computers has made everyone an author and an expert. The advent of Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V (better known as “copy and paste”) has allowed a deluge of uncontrolled and unchecked rubbish to be let loose into the world.

Washington State University

Nowhere is this more evident than in the production of so-called Quality Documents where one can generate reams of inspection reports that look absolutely wonderful but are in essence absolute rubbish—the “author” having taken a file on his machine and changed a few minor details to produce a new document, which then receives the same treatment to produce a third. This continues ad infinitum.

Procedural documents are also too often mindlessly fed through the copy-and-paste machine. Documents are often copied wholesale and messed about with just about enough to claim that they are unique.

The trouble, invariably, is that they are not read through thoroughly and errors are overlooked until too late. Meanwhile, the plagiarist who probably hasn’t got a clue about what he or she has produced will have walked away with a fat fee from someone else’s hard work.

Come the Reckoning

This is fine until such a time as when the structure addressed in all of these reports fails terminally and the matter ends up in court.

If the half-baked incompetents who produced these cut-and-paste stamps of approval think they can flannel their way out of trouble at that point, they are seriously mistaken!

Any expert brought in to analyze the Quality Assurance package will rapidly pick up on the copy-and-paste offspring, through tells such as the same batch numbers all through the project.

Temperatures and conditions more in line with Christmas than June tend to be dead giveaways, as does forgetting to change the date or the last client’s name.

End of defense. Guilty as charged of deception and possible fraud.

The Write Stuff

Handwritten reports (or at least reports done on the computer and backed up with a handwritten notebook) will always have a better chance of standing up to scrutiny.

People are more likely to believe from handwritten notes that the readings were taken, especially if there is evidence of grubby marks, overspray and other detritus from a job site.

The sooner that people realize that computers are not the way forward but are only a tool that can help, the better for ourselves, our profession, and our industry. Remember, rubbish in = rubbish out—no matter how neat and tidy it looks.

ABOUT THE THE BLOGGER Simon Hope Three decades as a self-employed coating consultant for the oil majors, military, offshore contractors and coating manufacturers—plus stints in shipping, power generation and other industries—have provided plenty of fodder for Simon Hope’s sharp observations. He welcomes “a healthy or unhealthy debate” on any coating topic, adding: “I never cease to be amazed at the messes that individuals manage to achieve—and, having reached rock bottom, seem to think that dynamiting is the way forwards.” SEE ALL CONTENT FROM THIS CONTRIBUTOR