Does this make sense? How far should YOUR tax dollars go to save the environment?

Question

Ok I work at a public library and I discard all of the old books out of the system. Usually when I do this I PRINT out the 1 page record, so that I can go back into a different program and delete it. Two different programs, one to delete it out of the card catalog, and one to delete it out of the entire system. Ok, to save paper, my boss wants me to WRITE down the # on the pocket page instead of printing it out. Thats all fine and good, but clicking print is 3x faster, and it's easier to read when I go back into the system to delete it. So, Americas tax dollars are paying me to do something I could easily do in about 15 hours, but will now take me about 25-30 hours. I'm probably saving about 300 sheets of paper a week, or roughly 1 pack. 1 pack. 1 pack of paper, twice as long to do the work. Your tax dollars are paying for it. I can't change the situation, but was just wondering how YOU as tax payers feel about this. Is 1 pack of paper WORTH it ?

Answer 1

stupid idea, waste of time and money

Answer 2

You forgot something in your figures....how much electricity, water, and fuel did it take to get the tree from where it was growing, logged it, trasport it, process it into paper, trasport the paper to the stores, have someone from the library pick up the office supplies?

Once you figure in all the above costs, it DOES make it ever so much more economical for you to write the number out.

What I'm wondering is why you cannot have multiple screens open on your computer at once?  Can you not cut and paste the number, title, author of the book onto another sheet in a program like Word Perfect, or Word Pad, and then print that single page out at the end of the day?  

That would be the best of both worlds.  Everything would be neat, clean, and clear.  It would use less paper than a human writing out the numbers, since most humans can not print as neatly and small as a computer can print, AND it would speed things up.

So you are saving all the energy used to produce those 300 sheets of paper, AND saving the tax payer money, because you should be able to perform this job function in a very speedy way.

~Garnet

Permaculture homesteading/farming over 20 years

Answer 3

300 sheets every week?  Yeah sure, that's worth it to me.  That adds up to a lot of paper every year.  You're also neglecting the cost of all that paper.

Answer 4

and your one out of ten million people doing the same thing. Why don't spend your spare time trying to fix the situation instead of telling us how it's wrong either way.

Answer 5

You print out 300 sheets of paper a week - one for each book? And writing down the number of 300 books as your boss suggests would take you an extra 10- 15 hours  a week? Two to three minutes per book?

No wonder you work for the government.

Answer 6

It depends upon your work load, and what isn't being done while you're doing the more time consuming method.

As a public employee, I can tell you that my department is overstaffed most of the time, as evidenced by the amount of solitaire and web surfing that gets done.

If we REALLY had to, we could get by with less.

Can you not cut and paste the info to a word doc and print that out?  I do that kind of thing all the time.

What pisses me off as a tax payer is bureaucracy, and the resulting people with little business experience in charge of making business decisions with my money, like there is an unending supply, and they have no idea how to accurately compute real data on which to base their decisions.  That an the idea that the answer is either "a" or "b" without making the effort of looking for a c, d, or e.

Answer 7

That IS stupid. My old boss used to want me to spend an hour calling every office supply place in the city to get the cheapest prices. It cost more to pay me for that hour than the ten cents a box we saved on paper clips.