A Low Tech Solution
Sometimes the low tech solution is best, if you are willing.
An acquaintance came to me one day with a problem that she felt required a
computer solution. She needed labels printed but the computer disk and the
computer program were unavailable. All she had was a printed list of names and
addresses
that had been printed from some unknown vastly complicated label or data base
program.
Initially, this did not seem like much of a problem as I had a program that
could read text and convert it to editable data. But the printed material she
presented had an odd format, unrelated data, and many other things that
prevented my text recognition software from making a suitable file to use or
transfer to a label printing software program. The file it created was
garbled and difficult to work with and the addresses were lost in a maize of
other information.
I asked her what label printing software program she was intending to use to
print the labels but she had no idea. As I went through all the steps that it
would take to extract the information of addresses and get them into a simple
digital
format, it was clear to see that it involved a lot of concentrated effort and
time, and many of the addresses had instructions "do not send to this address."
I told her it would be better if she went through the list by hand first and
marked all of the addresses that she intended to send invitations to, as some
of them were labeled, "do not send to this address" for one reason or another.
That way, it would take me less time to extract the needed information.
She asked me how much time would all this take and I told her I had no idea,
but that I charged $12.00 an hour, and it would take some time.
Then I enquired about what she was trying accomplish and learned that all she
was required to do was one mailing and mail one invitation to each person for a
class reunion.
I told her that if that job had been given to me I would use the low tech
solution and make a regular copy of the pages with a copy machine, and then
just take a pair of scissors and
cut out each address and rubber cement each one onto each envelope.
That way, you would not have to write the addresses, or type them, or print
labels or spend hours extracting them and converting them into digital format.
For a one-time mailing that was the simple low-tech solution and the easiest.
I sent her on her way, hoping that my suggestion had helped. But alas, we are
in the technical
age. The next time I saw her I asked her how she solved her problem. She
admitted that she typed each name and address by hand and printed the labels
with a different program.
Oh well, sometimes people just don’t like
the low tech solutions.