Line-Item Lucy: Form-Fitting Fanny's Sister

Kyla writes her Notes From The Cube to answer Pierre Dolet's Notes from a couple of days ago . . .

Cher Pierre,

Yes, Form-Fitting Fanny - I know who you mean. She must have a large family, for her sister is sitting on our floor. Call her Line-Item Lucy.

We have been trying to reduce the forms in our office and, at the same time, make everything electronic as much as possible. Not line-Item Lucy.

Hitting the electronic first: Lucy seems to have a need to have a handwritten version of everything. This makes sense for drawings. And for stick-on notes.

(Hey, I'm not a fanatic - though I know one she-devil wiz who actually has formatted her printer to work with stick-ons. First she has to put them on a piece of letter-sized paper, then hand-feed... I will agree with Lucy here: "paperless" is not for everything.)

Line-Item Lucy has philosophical problems with electronic "masters." Somewhere, sometime, somehow she has gotten it into her head that

Handwritten = Authentic

and so, because Lucy is supervisor over 4 poor souls - and reviews the documentation of another 20 serfs of equal rank below her - Lucy's philosophy has the weight of Official Theology on the subject.

Thus, it cometh to passeth: Every form is handwritten for review by Line-Item Lucy - then, upon approval (with her handwritten initials), it is typed into an electronic table, never a spreadsheet.

(Lucy does not appreciate spreadsheets - traumatized, apparently, by the great rifts between Lotus, Excel, Quattro, and the dozens of local spreadsheet sects of the mid-1990s, when Lucy was just entering the workforce, fresh from college - so her underlings use a word processing program with tables formatted in.)

The newly-typed form is then re-checked by Lucy, whose handwritten redlines are then returned to sender for fixing.

It should be noted that Line-Item Lucy's forte is finding fault - with form: grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization. Content is not the issue, BUT, where there's smoke there's fire, and along the way content issues usually get taken care of, too. And the work coming out of her department looks so good!

As for Forms proper, Lucy is a "party girl": the more the merrier.

Right now, for instance, Line-Item Lucy is in the process of creating a process review checklist that is 5 pages long and has over 300 line items to be checked. This will be helpful for those actively involved in the process. A guideline. And, of course, now a requirement.

To be reviewed by Lucy.

Line-by-line.