tales of horrendous inefficiencies

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > tales of horrendous inefficiencies

pram: Jun 10, 2001

Seat Safety Switch posted:

i worked on a project once where the customer would fax us something, we would OCR the fax, search-and-replace a few of the words, then try to reformat the fax into a word document template, print it as a PDF and re-fax it back to them for their approval before they would turn around and fax it to a third party.

about halfway through, we realized we could just hire an intern with a dymo label maker to do it by hand and put it back into the fax machine like a 1990s 'zine but my boss didn't go for it (he wanted to license the technology to a big company like microsoft or oracle as a replacement for all this faxing that businesses did circa 2008). near the end they wanted us to identify the client's font and reproduce it, which we ended up doing by OCRing the caller id off the cover page and referencing that into a lookup table of which font each client liked.

everything we were faxed was a print-off of a word document fresh from the laser and often faxed direct from the print driver.

jesus christ