Meanwhile back on site…….Since When is a Glovebox a Filing Cabinet?
Not that you’d really want either but let me start with an observation, and it’s just my opinion, but I think a glovebox resembles a filing cabinet like a house brick resembles a helicopter.
You might recall one of my builder team, Pete?
So, way back when (it had to be late 2016), during the endless months of me playing around with wire frames (not chicken pen wire, I mean App wire frames — it’s a prototyping approach for building Apps), anyway, I recall being perplexed about files, folders, storing information and the challenge of accessing data remotely. As you do.
At the time, when I was pondering the inarguable fact that building is a remote industry, it kept troubling me that if it’s almost entirely remote, why do people rely so much on paper and carry most of it in their cars/trucks/utes/wagons (delete as applicable)?
It occurred to me that Google has a thing called GDrive. Pretty obvious. Billions use it. Why then do people rely on an easily lost USB stick or on an easily corrupted and remotely inaccessible hard drive on a desktop, let alone hard copies of anything? Printed stuff, really?
What perplexed me more was how anyone could feel sufficiently confident to rely on the arcane belief that doing so was a) safe, b) logical, c) at all secure, or d) wise?
I guess people dancing in macabre masks, chanting and sacrificing small animals at the solstice was once a thing too but, well, clearly not anymore. If you follow me.
This issue became, graphically, vividly, all the more real to me late one afternoon when Pete and I were roadside having secured a site and cleaned up for the day, ready to head home.
Having dropped some kit into my car, I walked along the road to get some papers from Pete. A school bus, or the air it dragged with it, decided to imitate my barber and gave me a ridiculously close shave.
I remember staring at the back of the drag racing school bus, as if it’d change anything, and I thought, that was close.
He hadn’t seen this but I heard Pete laugh out the window of his truck, calling out to me “I’m looking Tone, it’s here somewhere.”
I walked around the footpath side of his truck to see what was apparently there somewhere, rather than play Russian roulette with drag racing school bus drivers. Besides, my hair’s way too short as it is.
I leant on the open passenger window and, eyeing all the paperwork scattered within the cabin, I said to him “mate, would your life end if this truck got stolen”, I was nodding toward the contents bursting out of the glovebox and onto the equally messy cabin floor.
Pete shrugged, saying “it wouldn’t end but, no…ha, ha….it wouldn’t be good”.
At this point Pete is half leaning half lying across the bench seat, like he’s posing for a still life portrait, and rummaging about in his glovebox. This was no small sedan’s glovebox, it’s a truck and this thing was positively capacious.
It was simply a case of him giving me invoices for materials he’d collected that morning on the way to the site. I’d already emailed him the purchase orders and payment confirmations. He’d collected the goods and just had to give me the paid invoices. Simple enough.
Ummm, no, apparently not.
I’m not saying that this is how any or many builders operate (mind you, not to disparage but I’ve studied enough gloveboxes and enough builders to know that, in truth, it’s a thing).
Pete could just be the odd man out, but I’m watching this horizontal ballet of arms and anguish and profanities as he tries to find these illusive bits of paper. Eventually I hear a laugh, and a piece of paper is waved at me “found one”.
Aha, progress! I think.
Pete’s talking at me. Pete’s always talking. The guy is a study in perpetual motion but you also couldn’t find a nicer bloke, and he’s an equal builder too. While he kept chattering away, I couldn’t help but think that there had to be a better way.
I’m not suggesting this was Pete’s fault but, as I’d said to him the night before when I emailed him the POs and payments “and remember Pete I hate paper, so just take a pic of the invoices and email them to me.”
That last bit clearly didn’t resonate. And there’s the rub.
Is it simpler to take a picture of what it is needed (docket, invoice, PO, plan changes, etc), email it, save it to GDrive, Dropbox or whatever, or is it more safer, professional, sensible, let alone secure (that last one’s a biggie) or to keep a large glovebox bursting with bits of stuff?
Pete’s still playing leaping lizard in the front of his truck, searching for the other docket, I couldn’t help myself — I’m punching away madly into my phone writing out notes of how a folder, an integrated filing and storage function for each project in your smartphone (it’s not in your phone, it’s in the Cloud, but you access it via the smartphone) had to be, well, smart.
I asked “seriously, why in god’s name are you risking everything by keeping all this stuff in your truck, you have no secure record of anything mate. You can though, and it’s so simple, please let me show you how?”
Poised at the kerbside door impatiently observing Pete’s hilarious efforts at gymnastics, I decided that this was stupid. It was pointless. As John Cleese, in the famous Monty Python’s Cheese Shop sketch, once said “what a senseless waste of human life”.
I wasn’t taking him literally, Pete was safe as houses. But the point was not lost on me.
Pete sat up, shrugged and said “it’s just easier”.
It dawned on me that, ultimately, some of the tools that people need to better manage their projects, their businesses, themselves, already exist yet people don’t use them because of a some misguided belief that it’s easier? It isn’t. It isn’t even close to easier.
Integrated project data, filed, in folders, on your smartphone. Integrated, evidenced, tracked, verifiable, remotely accessible, secure. That’s easier.
© Tony Huxley 2020
