SHARK TANK

Paper's not dead yet

It's a few years ago, and a mainframe programmer gets a job at a big company where he reports to a project manager who's, well, pretty set in his ways.

"He had started as a computer operator, mounting tapes and putting fan-fold paper in the printers, before working his way up to project manager," pilot fish on the scene recalls.

And as fish soon learns, his boss is the kind of guy who sees no reason to discard a technology that's still working, even if a newer technology is faster.

Within a few years, fish's boss retires. That's when fish gets the task of cleaning out seven big filing cabinets in his old boss's office.

And what does he find there? "At least a decade's worth of interoffice memos," sighs fish, "plus just about every company email he had ever received — all printed out and stamped with his name and the date he received it."

Emails consigned to pre-email era

Support pilot fish gets a call from a user.

It turns out she's getting a message that her email is over the storage limit and she can't send out any email. She tells fish she has archived her older email, but the system still says she's over the limit.

Fish quickly checks the server, and discovers no evidence of any archiving. Either she never archived it or the archiving isn't working at all.

So he walks the user through the process of checking her archiving settings. It turns out archiving is turned on.

But a little deeper into the settings, fish spots the problem: She has things set up to archive any emails she hadn't read or modified in 31 years.

"I asked her, 'How long have you been with the company,'" says fish.

"Her response was 'about five months.'