Yesterday I was in the supermarket queue, waiting for my turn to pay. I noticed that a couple of people who payed before had left their receipt attached to the strip of previous receipts, which were accumulating on the floor, despite the trash bin just on the side of the printer. I calculated that they were at least 20 receipts laying on the floor.
When it came to my turn to pay, before striping my credit card, I bent down, collected the receipts from the floor and threw them in the bin. Then I payed. And after that I detached my receipt from the printer and threw it in the bin as well.
With this small, inexpensive and easy action I got 2 results:
- The cashier said “thank you” to me
- More importantly: the people after me started to strip their receipts from the printer and threw them in the bin, leaving a clean floor for the people after them.
How many Excel spreadsheets do you have in your department/company? Spreadsheet that are filled with similar data or formulas, but not quite the same, used by different employees to get the same data (but the data is never the same because of accumulated errors and bugs in each of the spreadsheets)?
You could be the one to stop the madness, and take the time to throw the duplicate spreadsheets into the Database bin, which is the proper place to collect data and share it (and super fast and easy if using Oracle APEX), and show the people around you the correct way to do things.
