My Dog Ate My Homework

I'm old enough to remember stuff. I'm not going to tell you how old or what kind of stuff (which would point to how old). Some of the stuff I will admit to remembering is the old excuse The dog ate my homework. Okay, that wasn't really so long ago and you could argue that it's still a perfectly good excusesometimes. But less and less. If my kids were going to use that excuse, or something along those lines, it would sound more like, My dog ate my USB stick. More often their homework doesn't even see a USB stick and it would have to be My dog ate my laptop or, even worse, My dog ate the cloud; since the homework more often than not lives on Google Drive or some other cloud-based storage area.

So there you go. The prophecy of a paperless office has been fulfilled. Or has it? My kids might do all their homework in electronic form, but I can assure you that no business that I have seen has managed to do the same. Some are worse than others. I recently re-mortgaged my house at a ridiculously low interest rate and signed so many papers in duplicate that I think I got carpal tunnel syndrome. We started signing papers in the morning and it took so long we had to send out for pizza twice. Okay, I'm exaggerating slightly here, but only a little.

And even if you are not signing them, the funny thing about electronic documents (and high speed printers) is that it is so easy to print them out! Need to mark something up? Print it out! Handouts for a meeting? Print them out! Worried about your laptop crashing? Print out the documents and file them! Need supplies to support a paper airplane war between cubicles? Print out a bunch of documents! Wait did I already print that document out? Not sure? Just print it again. Instead of getting rid of paper documents, we've made it so easy to create paper documents.

Want a great example of the durability of paper? A lady was arrested last year at the Chicago airport with a one-way ticket to China. She was a software engineer working for Motorola and was caught at airport security with a whole bunch of Motorola documents that were marked confidential and proprietary information. A software engineer. With incriminating paper documents. A software engineer who apparently never heard of a scanner. Or a smartphone with a camera. You don't need a special spy camera these days to be James Bond. My phone has a scanner app that will take a picture of a document, do OCR on it, and turn it into a Word doc. If I was going to steal some trade secrets, I wouldn't do it by stuffing my bags full of paper documents. For a good chuckle you can read the article in the Chicago Tribune.

So, while we can't really say My dog ate my homework anymore, we can apparently still go unprepared into a meeting and toss out a My dog ate my report. Sort of. You try it out first and let me know how that works out.

LINK:	http://blog.ironmountain.com/2013/secure-shredding/my-dog-ate-my-homew...
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