Reminds me of an old job
Ober the course of my career I seem to have developed a reputation for being someone who actually bothers to think through designing a form that someone just slapped together as something of an afterthought.
Case in point, worked for a now defunct retailer doing PC repairs. Someone had created some real basic form for documenting repairs for the internal billing and everyone filled them out by hand. Trying to find something to write with was a challenge in this particular location, with people frequently stealing everyone else's pens, and it being next to impossible to order office supplies despite the retailer actually selling pens. Even better is that everyone just had a copy of a copy of a copy and so on for several generations. Every time someone ran out of forms they'd just get one from someone else, run off a bunch of copies, and then rinse and repeat the next time someone ran out.
So, I spent a slow afternoon one day redesigning a form I could fill out on the computer and then print off as-needed since they'd never let the printer run out of toner or paper. As an added bonus it could do things like autosums for me and I could hard code my employee ID and other info that never changed. I was also able to arrange the fields so that they would mimic the system I had to enter them into, meaning I could just move my eyes to the next field to the right instead of hunting all over the page for the info I needed. I was also able to use this to create forms for machines that had liquid damage or something and needed a repair estimate. Multiple people responsible for approving/rejecting the estimates commented on how my forms made things so much easier for them. They just had to look at the total, check either the repair or "crush" box, and sign it.
At another job I found myself using a form that hadn't been updated for about 2 major ERP updates, and amounted to someone just going through each section of a particular SAP t-code and writing down every field they saw. To make things even more fun it involved a lot of merged cells in Excel making it next to impossible to update and it was using some custom page size that couldn't be printed. I took control of it, ripped out all the fields no one actually used, color coded everything based on who was expected to fill out what bits of data, arranged fields based on how they appeared in SAP, used conditional formatting rules to draw out required fields, made liberal use of combo boxes to keep people from entering in invalid values, and made it so it could be printed since it was technically a document that could be relevant to audits.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
