2. The Big Contest

Everyone pretty much treaded water for the next couple of weeks until one of the social workers came up with the stupidest solution I can image. "If we can't easily print the double-sided form, let's make it single sided." Next, through my friend's eyes, I experience the things situation comedies are made of. The race to reduce the form to one page began.

One person came up with the bright idea of putting everything on one side of a piece of paper. Using type font sizes known only to the smallest of the little people of Ireland she managed to squeeze both sides of the form onto the front of a single sheet of 8 ½ x 11 paper inch paper. You couldn't read it and you certainly couldn't see what you were typing on it, but, in a true proof-of-concept effort she managed to take the prize for being the first to "solve" the double-sided printing problem.

Once the behind-the-back hooting from her peers died down, the social worker's boss explained the limits of her solution to her and the competition began again with even more intensity than before.

A number of other equally inspired solutions were offered, but the winner of the contest turned out to be a young social worker who simply eliminated items from the form until everything fit on one page. Brilliant? Well everyone, tired of the whole process, thought so. As an impartial observer, however, I can't figure out how data they had been collecting for years was somehow no longer necessary just because they thought they needed a single-sided form.

My friend was particularly upset. You see, one of the major sections of the double-sided form was a large area beginning on the front of the form and ending on the back where the social workers could enter their comments. There were maybe 30 lines on the double-sided form. The single-sided form had five lines. In fact one of the major factors in reducing the form to one side was the removal of the comment lines.

"Not a big deal." I can hear you saying, "People write way too much anyway." In general I wouldn't argue, but these folks were dealing with some pretty complex cases where the difference between helping a client and not helping them could turn on the quality and depth of the comments written.

By the time most people realized the implications of the new form it had been blessed by the agency and its governmental funding source and was in use. Making another change was deemed to be both embarrassing and costly in time and training. These folks don't know what embarrassing is. If anyone outside their agency with IT smarts ever caught wind of the horrid system they created and the goofy ad hoc "solutions" to problems they invented, the laughing might never stop. And, how many resources would it take to really fix the double-sided printing problem?