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I don't even know where to begin, so I'm just going to start venting.
I work at a fairly new, 80-employee software company.
Nobody here knows how to use MS Word properly. Fine. My predecessor designed
a handful of templates, which were all buggy and unstable, loaded with
"WordArtt" and text boxes and garbage styles. She wrote 100 pages of
training material and gave every single employee a half day of training on
how to use the templates.
Everybody hated the templates; few people used them. The only people who
used them were the executives, who also hated them but tried anyway.
Eventually, they gave up and stopped using the templates. They asked me to
fix the templates, which I did. They're now simple and refined and elegant
and blah blah blah...whatever.
I get almost daily phone calls asking people to create a new template. "I
need an itineray template! I need a fax template! I need a meeting minutes
template!" (IMHO, they just don't understand how to use a hierarchy of
headings -- e.g. an itenerary is nothing but a document with dates and
destinations for headings...)
In order to reduce the volume of requests, my boss has started fielding
these calls. She hacks away for a few minutes, and then calls me.
She's suggesting more training for people. She's thinking, "Teach a man to
fish" etc. etc. She's also trying to think of ways to enforce the use of
templates on internal and external documents -- writing to all managers,
etc.
Frankly, my own problem-solving skills haven't helped me with this one -- I
get all riled up and irritated. I didn't get in to this career path to be
Tommy Template. Anyone have similar problems? Solutions?
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