Copy + Paste Saves Lives And Fingers

I work at a small private institute for teaching English in a country where English is not our native language. The secretary there is quite sweet with everyone, and she is the one who suffers the most the pressure from our boss. I can’t tell who of the two has less knowledge about technology.

I get to work as usual, and I see the secretary typing as fast as she can. I ask her what she is doing because, obviously, she has a lot of other tasks to do — receive phone calls, talk with parents, fill in forms, etc. — and I can tell she was making her biggest effort.

Secretary: “[Boss] asked me to copy this whole text — more than ten pages! — from a PDF file to a doc for her daughter’s schoolwork.”

Me: “But why don’t you do this?”

I approach her desk, and I copy the text from the PDF and paste it onto the doc file. She looks at me as all the words from the PDF file appear immediately and magically in the doc file.

I think she is still thanking me to this day.