When I started my work life (after six years of College life during the 60's near the Haight
Ashbury district of San Francisco) I joined a company that had a ratio of Professionals to
Secretaries of about 3. Today that ratio is closer to 1:20, and I suspect that this ratio is going to
increase closer to infinity over the next few years. The jobs once done by secretaries are simply
being automated out of existence.
Now we have answering machines, and secretaries don't have to answer the phone any more. I
do not think there is a Secretary under 50 in our organization that still knows shorthand, and I do
not think there is a Professional under 40 who has ever given dictation. After all, who nowadays
is going to sit down in their overstuffed chair, at their huge executive desk, and take quill pen to
hand to write a letter which then has to be typed by a secretary before it finally gets mailed? The
heavies in corporations were the first people to get desktop computers, and at least in my area,
are still the only ones with personal printers. (The rest of us peons now gather around the shared
LAN printer, rather than the water cooler as in days of past.)
In my office, people don't even need to talk to each other any more, since the e-mail on the LAN
lets you send off a brainsprinkle (something smaller than a brainstorm) whenever the mood suits
you. (Of course, this has now generated an increase in flaming dialog, messages that probably
would not have been actually sent if, as in the old days, you had to get it typed into memo form
first, stew about it for a day, and then realize that you were being Juusst a bit too sharp with your
boss's boss.) Over time, more outside mail will be coming in as e-mail too, making even fewer
demands on the support staff of the organization. About half our mail comes in as faxes now.
With the Internet, and attmail, we can easily keep in touch with people in Russia, Europe, and
even the People's Republic of California. For the most part, these locations are just another
name in the e-mail address book. (The only place that I have not been able to successfully Inet
to, is to the ComputorLink offices 10 miles across town.)
As the number of secretaries declines, the number of computers surges. (A computer costs what?
Two months secretarial salary?) I would say that we are approaching a computer to Professional
ratio of 3 in our area. Admittedly, we are part of a rather technical group, and this ratio may be
somewhat higher than average, for today. But a ratio of at least 1 is likely the norm in any kind
of office environment today. Depending on how you define a computer, it is probably at least
that ratio in a burger stand today, too.
So, what do all these people do with these computers, besides lurk the Infobahn and send flaming
mail to each other? Our employees are now encouraged to make "think deep thoughts" a part of
our mission. We still have to do our mundane tasks (for which we have e-mail, and word
processors to help us). But we are now trying to quantify our business, and to do this, you need
spreadsheets, and then charting programs. Once you think you understand some portion of your
business, then generally you have to communicate this to somebody else. So here, Presentation
packages come into play, to connect your spreadsheets and charts together into a formal talk.
And usually you want to jazz it up with some snappy graphics, so enter one of several drawing
programs. And for those people not immediately available at your talk, a communications
program will let you send your whole presentation to anywhere in the world where you want
your ideas to be heard.
It is too expensive to do business "the old way". Today, we have to Work Smarter. And to do
that, you need information, and with information, you need a way to display it, to transform it,
and to communicate it. And desktop computers let you do all those things, quite cheaply. Word
Processors, Spreadsheets, Graphics programs, Charting programs, Presentation programs,
Statistical programs, in our case mathematical equation manipulation programs, all are used to
work smarter. And to consider doing things that were undreamed of a few years ago.
It is at this point where I am probably supposed to tell you just which specific packages to use for
these endeavors. But that is a theological discussion, and I am not gonna get into that. All the
modern packages today do more than most of us really need, and if they don't do it today, they
will in the next release. Everybody probably already knows the usual suspects, and if there are a
few new kids peaking through the fence, they will either grow up and become well known
themselves, or they will fade away and be forgotten.
My guess is, the best buys are the XXX Office packages, that combine everything into one fairly
cheap set. They generally work together in a similar manner, and the whole costs much less than
the sum of the parts. Find a package that seems to have all the stuff you think you want, and
make that your Christmas gift to yourself this year.
Read Next Article --> Return to Home Page ^
Afterwords:
This is the article that prompted me to reference the Company as World Wide Widgets. Maybe the article was deemed as politically incorrect, or maybe the censor was just in a bad mood that day. Who knows. The original article was, I think, much better written, and somewhat funner, but it was really tied around that specific Company and its practices, and for this more generic treatment things had to get watered down. The idea of using WWW as an alias did not come to me till after this was published.