Flashback to the 1980s, when this pilot fish is doing on-site IT support at a warehouse that’s very high-tech: The daily “pick sheet” is on a floppy disk.

“The warehouse had an office in the middle of the building for managing the inventory,” says fish. “The warehouse manager copied the pick sheet, listing what items were shipped out that day, to a 5-1/4-inch floppy diskette. He then sent this diskette to the corporate office.”

And that system works fine — until it doesn’t. One day fish gets a report from corporate that for the past two weeks the data on the floppy has been corrupt and they can’t read the file.

That means the warehouse manager has to print out and then fax the multiple-page listing to the corporate office, where it has to be manually keyed into the system — which is exactly what the automation is designed to prevent.

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