At Least It Saves Your Fingers From Getting Tired?

In the early 2000s, I worked in real estate writing title policies. Each policy required a description of the property to be written into the policy. Some were as simple as, “See description in Plat x, Book y, Page z.” Some were multi-page descriptions that took up to an hour to type up.

To save time on typing up the property descriptions, my manager bought a document scanner. There were several problems, though. Scanners were still prohibitively expensive, so she could only buy one, which she kept in her office. Some of these descriptions were copied off of hundred-year-old documents or microfiche, so scanning them created text full of errors we then had to go back and correct. And I was the only one tech-savvy enough to troubleshoot the scanner when it got fussy, which was often. (Basically, it wasn’t built to do what the manager wanted and I told her so.)

At the time, I had a typing speed of around 100 wpm. In the time it took me to print off the document, wait for the scanner to free up, scan the description, and correct the spelling errors the scanner made, I could type the entire description directly into the policy and move on to the next one.

But my manager and team lead still insisted I use the scanner because it “saved time”.