What did people used to do at work before the internet?

Sure, it's true for small ticket items. So if you can predict your needs for small ticket items, you have time to dick around with e-mails. And that is often what you do, because you send an e-mail: "I need 50 rolls of black electrical tape, 1000 of the small orange wire nuts, a thousand blue and a thousand gray wire nuts, 10,000 cable ties, 500 plenum-grade cable ties in red, and 2000 bridle rings." So the joker at the other end tells you he's got that in stock. Then he sends the order to the warehouse, and they don't have those damned plenum grade cable ties in stock, and they cost 15 times as much as ordinary cable ties, and suddenly, you find that you have to go out and buy them at a local electric supply house, who charge you three times as much as you pay for them to be shipped from New York, shipping included, but you have to do it because it was two days before you got the e-mail which says: "Ooops."

There are some businesses which can really take advantage of e-mails and web sites, sales in particular, but that is not necessarily small business, and that is not necessarily contractors. If you have a banquet booked, and your chef promised oysters Rockefeller, and you e-mail a local supplier, who says, yeah, we got that--how much time do you have to spend (waste) going out to find oysters, and probably paying too much, if the truck shows up without them. In the restaurant business, food is a dead loss if you don't move it right away, and many foods won't keep if you don't get them on a same day basis for the menu you have planned for a certain day.

This can be even more crucial in businesses which operate on cash-flow and margin with high ticket items. Your POS system is child's play compared to the security equipment and integrated security systems which we sold, installed and maintained. Two of our customers were hospitals which operated more than 300 cameras each. Without even considering new installations and renovations, mere maintenance and service on the camera systems employed one man year round (of course, we sent employees for that purpose as needed, it wasn't always the same employee, but that's how many employee hours were involved). You can keep about ten or a dozen cameras on the shelf, and get the good, new and compact models for less than $200 dollars. But what do you do if you've got a big job that requires, as one rather ordinary job we did in 2004 required, 18,000 feet of plenum grade RG59 coaxial cable, 100% copper braid, 95% copper core? That stuff runs about $400 per thousand feet, and that's your price, not the price to the customer. So that's $7,200 dollars worth of coax, and you don't spend that kind of money until you're ready to send the crew in, at which time the customer justifiably expects you to show up and throw down. DVD recorders for the camera systems, 100 gigs, run $1,800 per, and most customers want upgrades to 300 gigs, or, in some cases, even terabyte DVD recorders--and all those costs are our costs. When a customer is paying $5,000 or more per unit, they don't want to hear any excuses about why they aren't being installed when you said they were going to be, and on contracts over $100,000 they want to be and deserve to be kept informed all through the job, and assured that you'll bring the job in on time. Unless you're working for the Federal or state government, there's no such thing as cost overruns--any losses you eat, because they pay the price on the final estimate, after signing it--your labor costs because somebody screwed up are of no interest to them.

Small businesses (and almost all security equipment installers are small business--the national firms like Matrix or Tyco sub the installations) cannot afford to keep a half-a-million in equipment and materials on the shelf, and they can't afford to wait around because some clown at the suppliers wouldn't get off his dead ass to go look to confirm that the product is on the shelf. For business situations such as that, you speak in person to either someone at the manufacturer, or more likely, to a responsible party at the local wholesale rep.'s office. DVD recorders won't even be manufactured until you order them, and you have to know now how long you are going to have to wait for them to be delivered. 27" CRT-based display televisions for multiple camera image displays in security centers cost as much as DVD recorders, and nobody, but nobody other than the manufacturer keeps them in stock. To be efficient and effective, you need to speak to someone who physically confirms that they are in stock and can be shipped, or can talk to the assembly line supervisor and tell you how soon they can be shipped. When tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment roll in, you've just given yourself 30 days to pay for the order when you sign the bill of lading for receipt, but your customer may not pay you for six months. You just can't afford screw ups or delays when you're operating on cash flow and margin with big ticket equipment and materials. I can run over to the electric supply and pay too much for 500 bridle rings if someone screws up my order--i can't do that with terabyte DVD recorders, so i have to know if someone can physically verify that my order can be shipped, or is being manufactured for shipment on a certain date.

For a great many small business, the slow, waste everyone's time pace of e-mails (which is the reality of the situation, flashy web sites notwithstanding) just won't do, and face-to-face or telephone communications is how you remain competitive and effective. This is even more true when someone screws up your order and the customer demands to know why you aren't installing the $20,000 worth of DVD recorders she ordered.



As i say, this is true for some businesses--but it is not true for many other businesses. For large corporations, the waste entailed in unnecessary e-mails and the resultant decrease in efficiency of their employees is something which we all pay for.

Sometimes, e-mail is useful. But like the blizzard of memos of days gone by, they are usually something busy and effective people just don't have time for.

Wow, do you ever have a bias! For entry level lead development; email can hardly be rivaled, regardless of the industry.

Even the inventory issues you mentioned; emails can be invaluable as a time saver. Many efficient purveyors (especially if they want to work with me), will convert their internal (sometimes weekly) price changes and inventories into an email for broadcast. I in turn feed these updates into my own database (with an automated process) upon receipt and consequently maintain a tool that gives me accurate price/inventory info on a multitude of products I may or may not need from a large array of suppliers. This takes minutes a day and saves hours of calling around for price/inventory info when I need it. A well put together Operating system will then place necessary orders, at the best prices, from the purveyors that do indeed have what I need in stock, all on automated forms. Naturally humans still screw up constantly; so you want to verify things by phone in all important cases; but there can be no question the information system has streamlined the process. Verifying that an order will indeed be fulfilled takes considerably less time than calling a half a dozen or more people to learn what they have, at what price, only to have to confirm your order when you've finished your homework anyway.

Sounds to me like you need to find an exceptional I.T. guy to help you identify the repetitive tasks and take steps in reducing the man hours required to accomplish them. Granted; you're still screwed when the only game in town for supply is some hick working an archaic system (lack of system, really) where he doesn't even know what's on his own shelves without physically looking, but: As much as possible; that's the guy I would avoid doing business with unless his prices or inventory truly justified his waste of my time.

There are certainly no shortage of colossal wastes of time associated with information gathering, maintenance, delivery, etc.; but that doesn't mean the efficient systems aren't worth their weight in gold. I'd wager that literally billions of man-hours are wasted each year on repetitive tasks that could easily be handled more efficiently and precisely by well managed technology.

I'd wager you don't know much about small contracting businesses with large ticket product lines. I don't have a bias. But i don't try to drive a nail with a screwdriver handle, i use a hammer. E-mail can be a useful tool in some applications, but it's not in others. Nor is your rosey view of the wonders of technology realistic.

For example, you say that someone should know what's on the shelf unless his system is outmoded. Suppose the salesman tells me, yeah, we got that--but he hasn't checked. He could be saying that based on a POS system into which the latest sale has not been entered. His system tells him he's got 10,000 feet of RG59 on the shelf--so i say i'll run right over to pick it up, because we need it now (and we don't stock it, because, once again, in a cash-flow operation, we can't afford to keep $4000 of coax on the shelf unless and until we have a job which we know will pay for it--because the supplier wants his money in 30 days, and he doesn't care if we've been paid yet or not). Meanwhile, the guy at the loading dock is helping some guy to load up that 10,000 feet of coax, because another salesman just sold it to his customer, but it hasn't been entered into the POS system yet, because the customer's employee hasn't signed the invoice yet, and the warehouse man is till loading and hasn't sent the invoice to the salesman, who is busy with the 100 e-mails he got today, 92 of which are a waste of time. I show up, and i've just wasted my time and my gas, and will have to waste more driving somewhere else that has 10,000 feet of RG59, so the crew can get it and be on the job tomorrow on time.

All of which could have been easily prevented if the salesman had just put me on hold: "The system says we do, let me go check--hold the line." If i tried to do that with e-mail, all of us would be screwed. The salesman would not even know about it until he checked his e-mail. I wouldn't know about until i checked my e-mail, and saw the response. If i planned around the response, he could well find out about that sale later, and send me an e-mail to say, sorry, no can do, but i don't read it until tomorrow, because i got up early to drive over there and pick it up.

All e-mail does is allow people to waste time just as they did in the old days, at the speed of light. I don't know how much you know about the contracting business, but the salesmen of suppliers sit in an office at the front of the warehouse, and if you ask them to go check the stock, they do. They either phone the warehouseman to check, and set it aside, or, and the better ones do this--they go check themselves, and they say: "Bob, put that coax on a pallet, and put in the hold area for John, he'll be here first thing in the morning for it." Then he walks over to the phone, picks up the line i'm holding on, and tells me: "It'll be waiting when you get here." Or he tells me he doesn't have it, and wasting no more time, i say thanks, and call somebody else. And he doesn't resent that, because he knows how it works. He gets and keeps my account by making sure that i'm sure what i'm going to get and when.

That sort of thing is crucial in contracting, because of the financial constraints of large ticket orders that usually have to be paid for long before the contractor gets paid for the job.

If the sales rep. gets specs on a new product, he e-mails that to me. If i ask for an estimate on an order, he e-mails that. But when i need to take physical possession of an order by a certain time, no e-mail exchange can be as quick and effective as a telephone call, and physical verification of stock. If you do it that way, he can set aside my 10,000 feet of coax before the other guy places his order, and i get it. The other guy then needs to find it somewhere else. Or the other guy gets it, and i go somewhere else. Either way, nobody's time is wasted as can so often, and usually does happen with e-mail.

But e-mails can be wasteful just as memos were in the days of snail mail. People e-mail you minutes of meetings which you attended in person, for god's sake. They could have used their time better to have mailed the minutes to you when they weren't doing anything else, and then you'd have a paper copy without wasting your own time printing it. People fill e-mails with utter crap. You send a message. It has your name and address, the name and address of the person you send it to, and the names and addresses of anyone being copied. Even paper letters and memos in the old days didn't waste time on nonsense like that. So she replies to you, it has all the old crap on it, including the text of the messae you sent. You reply to her, and now it has all the old crap, plus the original message, plus her reply--and this goes on and on, until you have to search through most of the page just to find the current relevant data. People make a religious ritual of all the bullshit. Maybe you can avoid that in your line of work--i avoided it by discouraging e-mails unless they were the most obvious effective means of communication.

In the Revolution, two men were arrested for rape. Their colonel wrote a message to Washington asking if he should court-marshal them--as simple as that. On the same piece of paper, Washington wrote: "Proceed." On the same piece of paper, the colonel wrote: "Convicted, recommend execution." On the same piece of paper, Washington wrote: "Concur." On that same piece of paper, the Colonel sent the final message: "Executed." Sure, a runner went back and forth with the messages, but nobody wasted any time on the process.

You couldn't do that with e-mail without running off the first page. I repeat, e-mail is appropriate in some situations, and in others, it's a waste of everyone's time. The same was true in the days of snail mail.

I think you covered every word in the english language in that post, set.

Probably not, but i do my best.

You're talking right past me, Set. The email I described doesn't even say hello as often as not. It is frequently an automated price/inventory from his machine to mine with only one step to update my in-house knowledge of what's in his and how much it's going for. You can still make him verify every item of an order. The difference is: before you even set out to purchase widgets; you already know who doesn't have any widgets; and the prices of widgets at the suppliers who do. Conclusion: better. :wink:

Better than what?

I do that, that's simple. But i don't set out to go pick up the widgets until someone verifies for me that they now physically possess the widgets i want, and that they'll hold them for me. Once again, with high ticket items in a cash-flow business which operates on margin, stock acquisition and management is pretty damned crucial, and e-mail is often not an effective way to deal with that. Just because you responded immediately to an e-mail doesn't mean that everybody will, and very often, e-mail messages get blocked up at the service provider's servers, and even when they don't, you may not see them right away, and you may have other things to do at the moment. On the telephone, if you use it effectively, you can accomplish a lot that would require several e-mails, and accomplish it a lot faster.

I already pointed out that i considered it routine to get e-mails for stock and specs. My earlier post which you got all snotty about (referring to my bias) referred to my employers attitude toward e-mail, which i considered correct.

If you pay attention to context, you'll see that there was an earlier post about someone's boss putting the kybosh on e-mails, to which Jespah responded with comments about her Boss and organizing her e-mail. I commented about how i arranged and managed my e-mail, but i mostly commented about how my Boss used e-mail (or largely avoided it, justifiably).

It's a tool, Bill, it's not the answer to all questions of management, and it's not always the right tool in every situation.

If i was properly informed, you own your own business. You not only have no incentive to waste your time, you have every incentive to use your time as effectively as possible. Even if you don't own your own business, if you're in sales, pretty much the same situation applies. The same does not apply to all employees of large corporations, and most of the pointless e-mails i've had to deal with came from employees of large businesses whose only interested appeared to be filling their time and looking busy.

Set: I had no intention to be snotty. I'm discussing, not arguing... or so I thought. My point was only that the tool of email can be extremely useful when used properly. Yes, I've usually worked in my own businesses, and most of my adult life I have spent managing this or that. Last up were my restaurants and bar, which have since failed, so I took a consulting job that I'm now pretty sure isn't for me, either. So if you have a job, pushing a broom or something, let me know and I'll send you my salary requirements. :wink:

Yes I understand how very many people will use whatever nonsense they can think of to avoid actually doing anything productive. And yes; I too tire of useless emails. All that being said; there is no question in my mind they are a net positive. Here's a similar example: Texting is all the rage now and I can't for the life of me understand why most people do it. A phone call would be so much better right? The exception is if it eliminates a repetitive task: like letting 4 dozen potential poker players know you're "hosting a Tourney on Thursday; please RSVP". Reports that contain lots of details that can be more easily transferred than re-typed make more sense for email than phone calls or letters. Emails themselves also create a permanent record that can be retrieved in a heartbeat, which is frequently useful. At no point did I mean to argue against the idea that people waste time on email (mine and theirs), rather, my point is there are tons of uses where it really is the better mousetrap.

i used to play a hell of a lot more freecell than i do now...

I agree that e-mail can be useful in many ways--but for a lot of employees, it's uses are limited. For many millions more, it is useless, or doesn't even exist--factory workers, trades workers (whether trades union or not), minimum wage workers, highly skilled trade workers--there are many categories of workers for which it is pointless or even unavailable.

Hell, many millions of workers can't even play free cell . . .

I think the type of industry does make a difference re if it's actually useful or not. I work in financial services and I do database querying. I want your freakin' report request in writing so that I can refer to it as I create and tweak the query. A phone call, to me, is useless (albeit usually pleasant) and a meeting is a colossal waste of time.

When I put on my Business Analyst hat, though, meetings tend to be essential as I'm gathering requirements, but I'm still going to follow up with email so that we all make sure we have a true meeting of the minds. You don't want me misunderstanding your software requirements but a lot of back and forth emailing tends to be ludicrous and meetings are often better, but at that stage too many meetings can slip into analysis-paralysis AKA we're just going to fart around at a meeting and drink coffee because no one feels like actually working.

So it's a balance. I think email is best for proposals and then followup, kind of the before and after of meetings. Phone calls are the least useful but necessary if your critical people are in India or Texas or wherever and in-person discussions are too expensive. I find videoconferencing to generally be pretentious (plus it's expensive) and often useless. I've done more than one shared meeting, where it was a group phone call and everyone watched my screen as I did stuff electronically. I've done training that way and demonstrating new software, and it's always gone over very well.

One of my international colleagues is Chinese-Italian. She speaks English with a Chinese and an Italian accent. That just does not work for me on the phone. I NEED emails from her.