I don’t normally write much about the specifics of work, but I thought this little thing was kind of funny. Names and such have been not just changed, but totally eliminated, to protect the innocent and guilty alike.

The project I work on now is an awful lot like the last couple of projects I worked on (it could be argued that it’s just the latest phase of the same project, but whatever); as such, I’m often asked questions about how things were handled on previous iterations.

Today, for example, I got pulled aside and asked about a particular piece of correspondence that needs to be sent out to private industry partners notifying them that the organization is making some changes to it’s internal systems, and how that might or might not their experience in dealing with us during the changeover. This is a pretty standard sort of thing, and now the new organization is starting to craft theirs. I was asked if I knew where we might find a copy of a previous one to act as a template.

Dutifully, I sent out messages to the folks I knew who were around back then, asking if anyone had a copy lying in a disused folder on their hard drive or buried in the back of a cabinet or something. Sure enough, nobody remembered having one, but pointed me to other people who did, so I sent them emails…it’s the circle of office life.

This had been going on for a couple of hours. I’d gone to a couple of meetings, and come back to find that that second round of people didn’t have anything either, but certain other people (who more often than not, fell into the Venn overlap with the first round) might know something…

Then I had an epiphany. I typed five words into google.

Yep. First result.