This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human. Boss wants me to print the internet. Fine. I'll use all your company's resources and destroy your career. You know, I feel like that might be a lot of ink cartridges, Sam. It might be. But you know what they say? If you inked up, you're going to get... This is about a decade ago, but still well within the

realm of the internet. I was a technical writer for the government and had slowly been

transferring our old employee handbook, think government bureaucracy from the 1940s, into a modern

and actually useful documents. Think one page with our policies and links to useful websites like

office or personal management, form for workmen's

cop, etc. My boss wanted the whole thing printed out on her desk by the next morning. This was Monday

of Thanksgiving weekend. I printed out 200 pages or so and just had links to the various websites

in bold. This took about an hour and I left it on her desk before going home that night. She calls me in her office on Tuesday afternoon and proceeds to yell at me about how stupid I am. Do I think people can just go to a website when it is on paper? You freaking idiot. Yeah, dummy. You can't click a page. I need to print everything out. Come on. I calmly tell her that these sites are pretty dense and deep and it would be about 10,000 pages. She says she doesn't care and it needs to be on her. There's goddamn a first thing Monday morning. Oh my God. Mind you, this is now Tuesday and we usually had some of Wednesday off. I was not really planning to work Thursday, Thanksgiving, or Friday. And I had applied for leave and was looking forward to a nice, relaxing, long weekend. I don't have family, but I had plans. But okay, I asked for and got the request to have everything pertaining to the employee handbook online in a printed format. So that's like 10,000 pages. Bro. I also had real work and real deadlines.

A quick bit of context.

She was my boss.

She did my performance appraisals and she could make my life miserable and possibly fire me.

However, my clients were teams that put together engineering plans, biological assessments,

scientific journals, articles, reports to Congress that had real world deadlines.

On some of these, if you missed the publication date, your agency paid $100,000 a day in delay fees.

Ouch.

So a little steep.

But, you know, we need to print these 10,000 links ASAP.

A thousand random pieces of the internet.

I was printing and printing all the rest of Tuesday afternoon.

And then Wednesday.

I had to go to the site, print, click to the next link, print, etc.

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