6 ms·

The cards are more interesting to me than the word, which I originally thought was going to be some kind of copyright-protecting deliberate mistake. The cards

The cards are more interesting to me than the word, which I originally thought was going to be some kind of copyright-protecting deliberate mistake. The cards remind me of Jira tickets, with stamps and names as a kind of audit log of work associated with the ticket. I find myself curious about the information architecture and paper processes that companies built around such tickets going to and fro. Such architectures probably have fairly close analogues in distributed systems, and there may be a thing or two to learn from how more innovative and efficient organizations structured their paper pushing.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
In my experience, the difference is - unfortunately - that Jira tickets end up being discarded once a task has been finished, instead of becoming documentation for a feature. I think that was caused by volume, we'd do 10+ tasks or features a week at our most productive, and it quickly became line- or factory work, instead of carefully crafting individual features.
tasogare 6y ago
This is very specific of lexicography (dictionary making) given the huge amount of work, yet the natural partitioning of it. If you like this, you can see a bit more of it in the anime Fune wo amu (舟を編む).
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Speaking of that, I need to find time one of these days to research what the hell "a memo" is. I understand it was a piece of paper of sorts, used in a way similar to how e-mails are used today, but I don't understand how they were delivered to people, what was the equivalent of MTA there. I know how to use the word in writing ("I didn't get the memo"), but not much more than that.
- burlesona 6y ago
  My understanding is these were printed letters circulated internally via the mailroom. Most companies had workers who circulated both internal and external mail - so a couple times a day someone would come by with letters for you, both from the outside world, and from inside the office. Memoranda were generally announcements distributed to many people in the office. There were normally two trays or boxes for paper on people's desk, one was the "inbox" and one was the "outbox," and the mail person would place the new stuff in the inbox and take anything from the outbox to circulate it around the office. I never really lived that, although my first desk job did have an inbox and an outbox, the team wasn't big enough to have a mailroom, so we would just use those boxes to drop papers at other people's desks - hence the outbox didn't really get used, but the inbox did. Usually once a day a bundle of mail would get dropped off at the front desk and someone would take a turn walking the letters around the office, but there weren't that many of them as email was already a thing at that point.
  - drbw 6y ago
    Pretty much - I started work before even internal email was a thing, so everything was done on paper. And often hand-written paper at that. Hell, I made the first Word template for a work-item ticket! Before that we had custom forms to fill out. Even better, the developers worked in a different building to our users, so there would often be a couple of days lag to getting a response. If you needed a quicker answer, you had to phone them, or schedule a meeting if you needed to explain something in more detail.
    - stan_rogers 6y ago
      A person so inclined can still order interoffice routing envelopes ("hundred milers") from most stationers. For the yoots, those were string-tied manilla envelopes with twenty to one hundred little addressing boxes that be re-used until there was no more room to cross out the previous addressee and add a new one.
      - japanuspus 6y ago
        The model I used (less than 10 years ago) had a grid of punched holes so you could quickly tell if there was anything in it.
      - chokma 6y ago
        Found one of those in the stacks of papers from my father's time at IBM. Funny how paper-based information technology was back then - the first thing that comes to mind are the punch cards, but also later program listings were printed out a lot. We used stacks of "endless paper" core dumps / assembler listings when painting rooms, as you could just unfold a huge stack of paper to protect the floor from paint splatters.
      - skissane 6y ago
        As recently as 2008, I actually used those interoffice routing envelopes to submit the receipts for my expense reports. Then they introduced a new process involving scan and email.
      - 6y ago
- easygenes 6y ago
  Memo is abbreviated, firstly. The word is memorandum, and as the Latin root suggests, is something to “bring to mind.” Typically written or typed notes, which might get copied and passed around. They have more jargon meanings in certain contexts.
- cosmojg 6y ago
  Having worked somewhere that still used physical memos, I can share my experience. They were simply "important" notices and announcements printed on single sheets of paper hand-delivered to our desks by one of the managers or their secretaries. They'd often be on our desks before we got in, containing information that was realized the day before, but anything particularly urgent would be hand-delivered during the work day, usually around lunch. They were completely interchangeable with emails, including in the way they were written (like short letters). I don't understand why we used them, but alas, we did.
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    I worked somewhere that used paper memos and initially I thought they were just woefully tech-inept. It turns out if you’re doing shady stuff a written memo that can be immediately shredded is one of the more “secure” methods of communication because it doesn’t create a digital record like an email or a phone call do.
    - earthboundkid 6y ago
      I don’t know if this is still true, but it was sometimes the case that toner would retain images of what had been printed on it and could be recovered by forensic specialists.
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      CIA learned from the fall of the Shah of Iran that strip shredding is, given time and patience, a reversible operation.
      - stan_rogers 6y ago
        We were doing crosscut shredding - to the point of practically atomizing the paper - then incinerating the shredded material in the military before the Shah fell, at least for Secret and above. If the CIA wasn't doing that, well, that's their own lookout.
        6y ago
- ink_13 6y ago
  The internal "mail room" used to be a much bigger deal. At large companies, some number of times a day an actual person would come around with a cart, put things in your in-tray and remove things from your out-tray. Once their round had been completed they would return to the mail room to sort the outgoing materials and then repeat the process. I suspect that one of the reasons "starting in the mail room" used to be so venerated is that it's a good way to get to know a wide swath of people inside a company in a relatively short period.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Better Call Saul shows a lot of said mail room culture; not sure if it's accurate, but it's almost like a documentary in corporate life in the early 2000's. Wouldn't have thought paper was still as much of a thing back when, but, it's a law office and the internet hadn't been that much of a thing yet.
- signal11 6y ago
  Many large buildings in the past had mail chutes[1]. I’ve worked in a building with one; it also had a pigeon-hole messagebox per floor so people could get their mail. It wasn’t used that much, though, except for the odd journal subscription that someone had delivered to their office address. The system would only work with envelopes and magazines, anything bigger had to be collected from a central mailroom. Sending mail between offices was a little more convoluted —you could just use the post or a courier yourself, but if you got your document or memo in the hands of the right person (typically a mailroom clerk) before a cut-off time, it’d be sent as part of the company’s larger delivery. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_chute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_chute PS. Google Image Search has a good selection of office memos.
- zhte415 6y ago
  To add to others' comments about mail-rooms and internal posts, a memo would commonly also have a header section with a list of intended recipients and CC (literally, Carbon Copy), plus depending on organisation, an information security classification meaning sometimes they would be distributed via envelope, or require signing receipt for. Envelopes could be sealed in any number of ways, the most common I've seen is masking tape with a signature across it. Needless to say, the mail-room were privy to a lot of information should they care for it. Edit: Working where both emails and physical memos were used: Drafting a physical memo elicited a very different state of mind from banging out an email. Printing it out, proof reading on paper, there was a lot more care via reflection knowing this would be in someone's hand and they'd likely be looking at it on their desk, giving full attention, making notes with pen over it, rather than simply a message displayed on a screen while multiple other tasks pop up from other incoming mails or calendar reminders or IM chats. Slower, but a level of preciseness and everything needing to be just right, all the way down to how many spaces after a period vs a colon.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  I’m a millennial (late thirties), but I’ve worked in offices where there’s an internal mail system in which you write someone’s name on an envelope and then when it gets delivered, the name is scratched off to make it available for reuse for the next internal mailing.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I had an internship at a county hall once (IT department), I had to use those as well to have the back-up tapes I had to switch delivered to our other building every day.
  - Darkphibre 6y ago
    I work at a top-5 tech corporation, and we still have that! Though the mail room is the closest destination, with three different outboxes, and personalized in-box slots. It's handy for sending physical items (such as ship-it badges, booklets bringing awareness to this or that, or the occasional physical bill to be expensed). If I have a package delivered, there's someone with corporate security clearances that will swing it by the desk.
  - Infernal 6y ago
    Similar age and experience. Office keys, property tags, t-shirts or other swag, etc. arrive in those campus mail envelopes with the little string-and-knob closure and about 50 places for addressees on them.
jonhohle 6y ago
My wife was a teacher librarian and I used to give her interview questions related to data storage and retrieval. With no interest or background in CS she had no problem describing optimally efficient algorithms based on analog concepts, questions experienced engineers had difficulty answering.
- usrusr 6y ago
  I was assigned to medical filing in my nonmilitary service and being a programmer kid I immediately saw it through the algorithmic lens: sort your incoming files (the paper kind) before inserting them in the ordered shelves, sort larger stacks by subdividing into smaller stacks then ordering those (a very cheap operation if everything fits between the fingers of one hand!) in preparation for an ordered merge, sort very large stacks by pre-sorting into unordered buckets first and so on. All tuned on the spot to changing physical constraints like desk space. Or room space, that one time when we did a minor index reorganizion involving several tons of paper. Later when I took courses about RDBMS internals etc it felt like this experience helped a lot.
- Swizec 6y ago
  You're probably more worried about optimal algorithms when you can't trivially do thousands of operations per millisecond. It's kind of crazy how often the correct answer in engineering is something like "Eh, N is less than 100,000 and this only runs once. Brute force"
  - warent 6y ago
    Sometimes that is the case. Too often, in my experience, that assumption is made when it is actually technical debt that someone has to pay off down the road. It smells of move fast and break things.
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      To be fair, if it doesn't break, you never know.
- 6y ago
ben174 6y ago
Copyright protection was my first thought too, similar to how cartographers used to put “bunnies” in their maps to identify copycats. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mapmakers-sleight-of-hand-Cartographers-put-2889584.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mapmakers-sleight-of-han...
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Yeah I thought 'Dord' would be a word like that when I read the headline.
- lyall 6y ago
  Not just used to! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiATy-FfjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiATy-FfjI
- tkgally 6y ago
  A possible lexicographic example of a bunny is the entry "hink" in the first edition of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary [1]. I thought it was a mistake when I first learned about it, but some sources state that it was put there deliberately [2] [3]. [1] http://gally.net/leavings/00/0091.html http://gally.net/leavings/00/0091.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicographic_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicographic_error [3] http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2001-December/019104.html http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2001-Decemb...
  - mark-r 6y ago
    I've found that police use the word "hinky" to describe something suspiciously strange. I've never heard the word used by anybody else.
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
      You don't watch NCIS ?
    - hughdbrown 6y ago
      From The Fugitive (25 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdPciselWuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdPciselWuo

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

In my experience, the difference is - unfortunately - that Jira tickets end up being discarded once a task has been finished, instead of becoming documentation for a feature. I think that was caused by volume, we'd do 10+ tasks or features a week at our most productive, and it quickly became line- or factory work, instead of carefully crafting individual features.

tasogare 6y ago

This is very specific of lexicography (dictionary making) given the huge amount of work, yet the natural partitioning of it. If you like this, you can see a bit more of it in the anime Fune wo amu (舟を編む).

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Speaking of that, I need to find time one of these days to research what the hell "a memo" is. I understand it was a piece of paper of sorts, used in a way similar to how e-mails are used today, but I don't understand how they were delivered to people, what was the equivalent of MTA there. I know how to use the word in writing ("I didn't get the memo"), but not much more than that.

burlesona 6y ago
My understanding is these were printed letters circulated internally via the mailroom. Most companies had workers who circulated both internal and external mail - so a couple times a day someone would come by with letters for you, both from the outside world, and from inside the office. Memoranda were generally announcements distributed to many people in the office. There were normally two trays or boxes for paper on people's desk, one was the "inbox" and one was the "outbox," and the mail person would place the new stuff in the inbox and take anything from the outbox to circulate it around the office. I never really lived that, although my first desk job did have an inbox and an outbox, the team wasn't big enough to have a mailroom, so we would just use those boxes to drop papers at other people's desks - hence the outbox didn't really get used, but the inbox did. Usually once a day a bundle of mail would get dropped off at the front desk and someone would take a turn walking the letters around the office, but there weren't that many of them as email was already a thing at that point.
- drbw 6y ago
  Pretty much - I started work before even internal email was a thing, so everything was done on paper. And often hand-written paper at that. Hell, I made the first Word template for a work-item ticket! Before that we had custom forms to fill out. Even better, the developers worked in a different building to our users, so there would often be a couple of days lag to getting a response. If you needed a quicker answer, you had to phone them, or schedule a meeting if you needed to explain something in more detail.
  - stan_rogers 6y ago
    A person so inclined can still order interoffice routing envelopes ("hundred milers") from most stationers. For the yoots, those were string-tied manilla envelopes with twenty to one hundred little addressing boxes that be re-used until there was no more room to cross out the previous addressee and add a new one.
    - japanuspus 6y ago
      The model I used (less than 10 years ago) had a grid of punched holes so you could quickly tell if there was anything in it.
    - chokma 6y ago
      Found one of those in the stacks of papers from my father's time at IBM. Funny how paper-based information technology was back then - the first thing that comes to mind are the punch cards, but also later program listings were printed out a lot. We used stacks of "endless paper" core dumps / assembler listings when painting rooms, as you could just unfold a huge stack of paper to protect the floor from paint splatters.
    - skissane 6y ago
      As recently as 2008, I actually used those interoffice routing envelopes to submit the receipts for my expense reports. Then they introduced a new process involving scan and email.
    - 6y ago
easygenes 6y ago
Memo is abbreviated, firstly. The word is memorandum, and as the Latin root suggests, is something to “bring to mind.” Typically written or typed notes, which might get copied and passed around. They have more jargon meanings in certain contexts.
cosmojg 6y ago
Having worked somewhere that still used physical memos, I can share my experience. They were simply "important" notices and announcements printed on single sheets of paper hand-delivered to our desks by one of the managers or their secretaries. They'd often be on our desks before we got in, containing information that was realized the day before, but anything particularly urgent would be hand-delivered during the work day, usually around lunch. They were completely interchangeable with emails, including in the way they were written (like short letters). I don't understand why we used them, but alas, we did.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  I worked somewhere that used paper memos and initially I thought they were just woefully tech-inept. It turns out if you’re doing shady stuff a written memo that can be immediately shredded is one of the more “secure” methods of communication because it doesn’t create a digital record like an email or a phone call do.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    I don’t know if this is still true, but it was sometimes the case that toner would retain images of what had been printed on it and could be recovered by forensic specialists.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    CIA learned from the fall of the Shah of Iran that strip shredding is, given time and patience, a reversible operation.
    - stan_rogers 6y ago
      We were doing crosscut shredding - to the point of practically atomizing the paper - then incinerating the shredded material in the military before the Shah fell, at least for Secret and above. If the CIA wasn't doing that, well, that's their own lookout.
      - 6y ago
ink_13 6y ago
The internal "mail room" used to be a much bigger deal. At large companies, some number of times a day an actual person would come around with a cart, put things in your in-tray and remove things from your out-tray. Once their round had been completed they would return to the mail room to sort the outgoing materials and then repeat the process. I suspect that one of the reasons "starting in the mail room" used to be so venerated is that it's a good way to get to know a wide swath of people inside a company in a relatively short period.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Better Call Saul shows a lot of said mail room culture; not sure if it's accurate, but it's almost like a documentary in corporate life in the early 2000's. Wouldn't have thought paper was still as much of a thing back when, but, it's a law office and the internet hadn't been that much of a thing yet.
signal11 6y ago
Many large buildings in the past had mail chutes[1]. I’ve worked in a building with one; it also had a pigeon-hole messagebox per floor so people could get their mail. It wasn’t used that much, though, except for the odd journal subscription that someone had delivered to their office address. The system would only work with envelopes and magazines, anything bigger had to be collected from a central mailroom. Sending mail between offices was a little more convoluted —you could just use the post or a courier yourself, but if you got your document or memo in the hands of the right person (typically a mailroom clerk) before a cut-off time, it’d be sent as part of the company’s larger delivery. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_chute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_chute PS. Google Image Search has a good selection of office memos.
zhte415 6y ago
To add to others' comments about mail-rooms and internal posts, a memo would commonly also have a header section with a list of intended recipients and CC (literally, Carbon Copy), plus depending on organisation, an information security classification meaning sometimes they would be distributed via envelope, or require signing receipt for. Envelopes could be sealed in any number of ways, the most common I've seen is masking tape with a signature across it. Needless to say, the mail-room were privy to a lot of information should they care for it. Edit: Working where both emails and physical memos were used: Drafting a physical memo elicited a very different state of mind from banging out an email. Printing it out, proof reading on paper, there was a lot more care via reflection knowing this would be in someone's hand and they'd likely be looking at it on their desk, giving full attention, making notes with pen over it, rather than simply a message displayed on a screen while multiple other tasks pop up from other incoming mails or calendar reminders or IM chats. Slower, but a level of preciseness and everything needing to be just right, all the way down to how many spaces after a period vs a colon.
earthboundkid 6y ago
I’m a millennial (late thirties), but I’ve worked in offices where there’s an internal mail system in which you write someone’s name on an envelope and then when it gets delivered, the name is scratched off to make it available for reuse for the next internal mailing.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I had an internship at a county hall once (IT department), I had to use those as well to have the back-up tapes I had to switch delivered to our other building every day.
- Darkphibre 6y ago
  I work at a top-5 tech corporation, and we still have that! Though the mail room is the closest destination, with three different outboxes, and personalized in-box slots. It's handy for sending physical items (such as ship-it badges, booklets bringing awareness to this or that, or the occasional physical bill to be expensed). If I have a package delivered, there's someone with corporate security clearances that will swing it by the desk.
- Infernal 6y ago
  Similar age and experience. Office keys, property tags, t-shirts or other swag, etc. arrive in those campus mail envelopes with the little string-and-knob closure and about 50 places for addressees on them.

jonhohle 6y ago

My wife was a teacher librarian and I used to give her interview questions related to data storage and retrieval. With no interest or background in CS she had no problem describing optimally efficient algorithms based on analog concepts, questions experienced engineers had difficulty answering.

usrusr 6y ago
I was assigned to medical filing in my nonmilitary service and being a programmer kid I immediately saw it through the algorithmic lens: sort your incoming files (the paper kind) before inserting them in the ordered shelves, sort larger stacks by subdividing into smaller stacks then ordering those (a very cheap operation if everything fits between the fingers of one hand!) in preparation for an ordered merge, sort very large stacks by pre-sorting into unordered buckets first and so on. All tuned on the spot to changing physical constraints like desk space. Or room space, that one time when we did a minor index reorganizion involving several tons of paper. Later when I took courses about RDBMS internals etc it felt like this experience helped a lot.
Swizec 6y ago
You're probably more worried about optimal algorithms when you can't trivially do thousands of operations per millisecond. It's kind of crazy how often the correct answer in engineering is something like "Eh, N is less than 100,000 and this only runs once. Brute force"
- warent 6y ago
  Sometimes that is the case. Too often, in my experience, that assumption is made when it is actually technical debt that someone has to pay off down the road. It smells of move fast and break things.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    To be fair, if it doesn't break, you never know.
6y ago

ben174 6y ago

Copyright protection was my first thought too, similar to how cartographers used to put “bunnies” in their maps to identify copycats. https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mapmakers-sleight-of-hand-Cartographers-put-2889584.php https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Mapmakers-sleight-of-han...

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Yeah I thought 'Dord' would be a word like that when I read the headline.
lyall 6y ago
Not just used to! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiATy-FfjI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeiATy-FfjI
tkgally 6y ago
A possible lexicographic example of a bunny is the entry "hink" in the first edition of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary [1]. I thought it was a mistake when I first learned about it, but some sources state that it was put there deliberately [2] [3]. [1] http://gally.net/leavings/00/0091.html http://gally.net/leavings/00/0091.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicographic_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicographic_error [3] http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2001-December/019104.html http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2001-Decemb...
- mark-r 6y ago
  I've found that police use the word "hinky" to describe something suspiciously strange. I've never heard the word used by anybody else.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    You don't watch NCIS ?
  - hughdbrown 6y ago
    From The Fugitive (25 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdPciselWuo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdPciselWuo