Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Brad Johnson on September 18, 2018, 03:46:41 PM
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...willful ignorance is bad business.
I'm part of a local civic club that has a small restaurant at our annual regional fair. They're getting ready for the open and I'm helping the guy tasked with getting the cash registers ready. The registers have a 5"x5" menu keypad along with the regular array of entry buttons. The label is set up in Publisher and I still I still have the template from when I was committee chair so I revised the layout and sent the file.
I get a message they can't open the file. Oh, okay. You must be on a Mac (no native Publisher support). No. Oh, you only have the version of office which doesn't have Publisher? No, and what is Publisher? We don't use Office. We're on an AS/400. Wait, what...?
Turns out the guy's family business, a rather large industrial repair shop, runs everything on an AS/400. Everyrythiiiiiing. Not a single person in the place has MS Office, or even OpenOffice for that matter. I asked him how they handle their written documents and business correspondence and it turns out they still use WordPerfect for AS/400 (hasn't been available since the mid 1990's). Email? Some custom-written somethingorother. YGBFKM??!!
I asked if he thought it might be a good idea to have at least their clerical staff on something that was more universally business-friendly and he said, "Nah, we get along fine. We don't need the expense." This is a business that does very specialized repair from large customers all over the U.S., several tens of millions of dollars worth a year, so you'd think they would want to be business-compatible in a least some rudimentary fashion. Nope. It boggles the mind that not one single person in their office has the most common office productivity suite in existence. He thinks the couple grand it would take to have few nice desktop machines with Office on them for the business staff is too expensive. It makes me wonder what gyrations their customers must go through to get a simple letter to them.
Brad
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I thought most big companies were getting to the point of no longer accepting written invoices.
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A used laptop with a cheap printer and using the free Open Office could be like $100. Plus shouldn't they be able to write off certain business expenses?