No, not really. Raleigh, North Carolina, 2000-2001. At this moment in time aside from some other things like being in a band and acting in pro wrestling, I was making my “day job” money as a computer geek. I had picked up a gig through a temp agency doing an IT inventory for Nortel Networks’ huge (17 buildings at that time) RTP campus. The job: me and a dozen-and-a-half other jobronies crawling around under desks with clipboards writing down asset tag numbers, passing them on to someone who would type it all in to a database.
After about a week and a half of this I said “hey, all of these things are bar-coded.” (Remember this was 2000 – QR codes and everyone having a scanner in their pocket hadn’t been invented yet. WiFi barely existed; we innovated some use of that during this process as well.) “Why do y’all have 18 people here doing all this badly and with huge probability of human error breaking your data, when you could just scan the barcode, ping it against the database, verify the information, and go?”
And with that question I cost 16 people their temp jobs 🙁 Well, not quite, but more true than I like to think. Some of the details are hazy now because my whole position and context shifted from being the one doing the inventory to being the one (* again not quite, more later) designing the tools to conduct the inventory, testing it in the field, and then launching it globally as an entirely new “Global Asset Management System” that rolled out to two dozen some-odd countries worldwide, they convened a seminar and flew people in from all over the globe for a week, put ’em up in fancy hotels, yadda yadda.
Apparently it was one hell of a question.
My brainstorm was related to some tech I had come across at semi-random a few months earlier, which was a Palm Pilot (remember those?) that had a built-in barcode scanner. Like the laser type, this is way before photo recognition in your pocket or QR codes or any of that, remember. I figured a little research to get the necessary tools in order, and it couldn’t be that tough to build a little tool (what we’d now refer to as an “app”) that did what we needed it to do.
I was right, and that’s where we get into the photocopy thing…
