by Greybeard » Fri Oct 30, 2009 6:30 am
Paperless environment! What a joke that is! Just in Seattle, United Airlines has probably 3 dozen printers, that will print out the same useless information, that nobody reads, and tosses straight into the garbage can. And Seattle is not a big UAL station.
A sample message; 5 to 10 lines of printer address codes, a 4 line message stating that aircraft such and such, flying flight 783 from SAN to LAX, has a bad seatbelt in seat 25D that needs to be replaced with part no.1234567890, and than another 5 to 10 lines pretty much repeating the printer address codes.
Only 2 people in Los Angeles are going to have to do something with this message. A store keeper, who will have to get the part ready, and the mechanic who will replace the seatbelt. But I'm guesstimating that if you were to lay out all the printouts, from all the cities that each have countless numbers of printers, you'd need about a ream of paper, not to mention all the ink cartridges. And this was a very short message. A message about container movements will be several pages long. From Seattle, the only containerized aircraft is a 777 to Tokyo, that goes out full every day, and comes in full every day. We will never be able to board extra containers, that will end up in Boston, because they have a shortage of them. But we'll have roughly 72 pages of print, just in Seattle, telling us about those kinds of movements.
If I go to the doctor, I get a full size sheet of paper telling me that I paid for the visit, what day and what time etc. Then a few more pages about my vitals and the discussion I had with the doctor, and if I need any meds, another page or two for a reciept, and several pages of info about the meds.
I go to the lumberyard to pick up a sheet of plywood. I get a 1 page reciept, another one gets filed, 1 gets tossed right away, and 1 gets put in a basket, so the yard guy can go get it for me.
Need to print out something from your computer? Better take a look at the preview of the print, because if you don't, it'll be a 2-pager, because the last line, of usually totally useless information, will require a second page.
