Director and Founder – Ian Worcester
I remember when I first ventured out into the realms of something that could be classed as semi-technical. In the early 90’s I landed a job working as a “Text Structurer” in a newly created team within the document imaging section at Rank Xerox in Mitcheldean.
Working as a “text structurer” basically required sitting at a PC (Windows 3.1 for anyone that is interested) with a folder full of Word 6.0 documents that the inhouse team of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) specialists had generated. They did this by scanning clients’ original paper documents onto the company servers to capture the text elements of the original documents. The OCR team had almost a mythical status in the office due to the scarcity of sightings, people occasionally claimed to have seen a fleeting glimpse of one but without any hard evidence to back it up so we all found it quite hard to believe. We therefore just assumed that this team was like an OCR version of an all year round Father Christmas who believed that the best present we could want would be lots and lots of yummy word documents that required sorting out.
Comparing the original paper copy of a document, usually many printed/typed pages of some presumably very important document that was too valuable to exist solely in its highly combustible original form, to the scanned Word document which would always contain a single very long line of text spanning many pages, interspersed with a lot tags where formatting should be applied such as “&crlf;” for carriage returns, “&tab;” for… you can probably work that one out… and many others to indicate special characters, bullet points, etc. There was no Bold, Italic, underlining, anything, everything was a code. Our job was to try and “structure” the text in the Word document to resemble the original paper copy. I can feel the envy seeping through the screen…
Made up of around 6 initially, peaking at around 20 individuals from different backgrounds with different skill sets but mainly hired on the strength of having the words “Microsoft Word” somewhere in their CV. The team included but was not limited to:
Andrew: An older chap who had spent a lifetime in the printing trade but who I believe felt that this new fangled technology was a step too far so he spent the majority of his time trying to find a way to find holes in his contract so he could leave preferable with some extra cash
Jono: An all round great guy, constantly hilarious but also hard working even after deciding to remove a finger in a motorcycle accident. He became a firm friend and partner in crime
Cilla: Lovely girl who later went on to become a recruitment consultant in Bristol and recruited me for my first proper development role (A story for another time).
Colin: A one man football team who used to join my friends and me in a 5 a side tournament/free-for-all melee, and was solely responsible for the small amount of success we had and not forgetting
Kat: Amazingly up-beat all the time she used to marvel in telling us that this job was soooo much better than her last position where she had worked in a factory making cream filled chocolate willies!
With everyone in the team being new to Microsoft’s Word it meant that for the most part we learnt as we went. Initially the documents were painstakingly reconstructed on screen to resemble the original as closely as possible. We achieved this by finding the aforementioned tags hidden within the text, highlighting them and overwriting with the correct formatting, moving margins, inserting page breaks, etc then comparing to the original document, rinsing and repeating until we were brave enough to ask the manager “Is this ok?.. Please say yes”.
Quickly discovering Ctrl+H (Edit and Replace) improved the speed of the process significantly but it was still a mind numbing slog to get any significant number of pages formatted in a day. Then one day whilst having lunch and idling through the menu options of Word 6.0 I happened across an option I was unfamiliar with… “Record Macro”. Intrigued, I obviously clicked it to see what would happen. Slightly disappointingly, smoke did not immediately emanate from the back of the PC, nor were the innermost secrets of the universe finally revealed across the screen. Disappointingly (Initially at least) I was presented with the ability to record a series of actions within the document which could then be repeated by clicking an assigned hotkey or button. On further experimentation I discovered how useful macros would become in my day-to-day life at Xerox allowing me to record many different Edit/Replace actions along with finding specific words, highlighting, underlining, and other useful operations. Every day I found more and more ways to navigate the document and apply formatting in different areas all of which reduced the time to complete even very large and previously tear inducing documents.
Implementing Macros into my daily routine meant that I shot ahead of every other member of my team in my page count processed per day. Colleagues sat in my immediate vicinity would ask why my screen kept looking like the PC was having some kind of weird seizure for a couple of minutes before looking sparkly and 90% complete after having just opened the document, so I shared my discovery with any team members that took an interest so they too could enjoy the benefits of macros.
Before long the management also got wind of the increased page counts emanating from my cubicle and spreading to nearby PC’s. After coming clean about why my daily page counts were so high, at the tender age of 22, I was promoted to a kind of team mentor tasked with teaching everyone in the team about Macros. By this time I had also started tinkering with the WordBasic language that was stored behind the scenes so I could tweak specific parts of the macro if I wanted a little more control and so my software meddling if not full-on development days had officially started… if you don’t count writing small programs on a Sinclair ZX81 in the early 80’s with my sister to make the screen change colour or answer simple questions in Sinclair Basic.
Even with the added benefits of macros, we were still subject to the (sometimes unusual) actions of the workers who were a constant source of issues that had to be unravelled. One time that springs to mind was when another young team member who shall remain nameless came to me asking if I could help. “I just can’t change the size of my page header!?” was the issue. I tried to remedy the header sizing problem in the normal manner but to no avail, it seemed that the header was stuck at a much larger size than it normally would be and wouldn‘t budge. Then, I thought I would switch on the hidden symbols for the document (The button that looks a bit like a backwards P on the ribbon at the top of the page). On doing so I noticed that the header was full of carriage return symbols, so did an edit/replace to remove all of them, removing a total count of over 32,000. Thanking me and ensuring me he had absolutely no idea why Word had placed all the carriage returns in the header, he carried on with his work. As I walked back to my desk, Cilla approached me and told me that she saw what had happened. She told me she had noticed him nodding tiredly whilst in the middle of formatting a document and, mid-type, his head had lolled forward as he dissolved into comfortable unconsciousness with his right index finger firmly planted on the carriage return key, awaking several minutes later with a start and an unexpectedly large header. Therein the mystery was solved.
Soon after starting at Rank Xerox, the first CD writers started to appear. It seemed like an excellent choice as a medium with which to supply clients with their electronic documentation, if a bit pricey, with each disk costing roughly the same as the defence budget for a small country. The in-house IT department rapidly set to work setting up a specific machine to ‘burn’ CD’s, which sounds more exciting than it is. It soon became apparent that the early CD writers were a little sensitive to motion which would cause the burn (write) process to fail if anyone touched the desk, walked past the desk, thought about walking past the desk, etc. After the third tremor-laden failed burn attempt, a taped off eight metre exclusion zone was erected around the PC and CD writer manned by guard posts and attack dogs… Ok, I made that last bit up, but no one was allowed to cross the line on pain of disciplinary action for fear of causing another sensitive write operation to be rendered useless. It is difficult to believe such issues ever existed moving files from one place to another given the wealth of simple options available to us today.
I have fond memories of my time at Rank Xerox, mainly of the characters I met but also the feeling of accomplishment I attained from discovering new things and helping others improve and manage their work-lives more comfortably. When I left after roughly two years, it was to start a new adventure in a new city as a trainee software developer which I will detail in the future.
I believe it is healthy to reflect on our lives which may have seemed mundane and monotonous at the time where we found parts of ourselves we didn’t really know existed, each of which pushed us forwards, towards the place we are today. If we ever feel negative about ourselves in the present, we can always find achievements from the past to comfort ourselves that we have the ability to overcome and move forwards.
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]No Standard Path
Director and Founder – Ian Worcester
I remember when I first ventured out into the realms of something that could be classed as semi-technical. In the early 90’s I landed a job working as a “Text Structurer” in a newly created team within the document imaging section at Rank Xerox in Mitcheldean.
Working as a “text structurer” basically required sitting at a PC (Windows 3.1 for anyone that is interested) with a folder full of Word 6.0 documents that the inhouse team of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) specialists had generated. They did this by scanning clients’ original paper documents onto the company servers to capture the text elements of the original documents. The OCR team had almost a mythical status in the office due to the scarcity of sightings, people occasionally claimed to have seen a fleeting glimpse of one but without any hard evidence to back it up so we all found it quite hard to believe. We therefore just assumed that this team was like an OCR version of an all year round Father Christmas who believed that the best present we could want would be lots and lots of yummy word documents that required sorting out.
Comparing the original paper copy of a document, usually many printed/typed pages of some presumably very important document that was too valuable to exist solely in its highly combustible original form, to the scanned Word document which would always contain a single very long line of text spanning many pages, interspersed with a lot tags where formatting should be applied such as “&crlf;” for carriage returns, “&tab;” for… you can probably work that one out… and many others to indicate special characters, bullet points, etc. There was no Bold, Italic, underlining, anything, everything was a code. Our job was to try and “structure” the text in the Word document to resemble the original paper copy. I can feel the envy seeping through the screen…
Made up of around 6 initially, peaking at around 20 individuals from different backgrounds with different skill sets but mainly hired on the strength of having the words “Microsoft Word” somewhere in their CV. The team included but was not limited to:
Andrew: An older chap who had spent a lifetime in the printing trade but who I believe felt that this new fangled technology was a step too far so he spent the majority of his time trying to find a way to find holes in his contract so he could leave preferable with some extra cash
Jono: An all round great guy, constantly hilarious but also hard working even after deciding to remove a finger in a motorcycle accident. He became a firm friend and partner in crime
Cilla: Lovely girl who later went on to become a recruitment consultant in Bristol and recruited me for my first proper development role (A story for another time).
Colin: A one man football team who used to join my friends and me in a 5 a side tournament/free-for-all melee, and was solely responsible for the small amount of success we had and not forgetting
Kat: Amazingly up-beat all the time she used to marvel in telling us that this job was soooo much better than her last position where she had worked in a factory making cream filled chocolate willies!
With everyone in the team being new to Microsoft’s Word it meant that for the most part we learnt as we went. Initially the documents were painstakingly reconstructed on screen to resemble the original as closely as possible. We achieved this by finding the aforementioned tags hidden within the text, highlighting them and overwriting with the correct formatting, moving margins, inserting page breaks, etc then comparing to the original document, rinsing and repeating until we were brave enough to ask the manager “Is this ok?.. Please say yes”.
Quickly discovering Ctrl+H (Edit and Replace) improved the speed of the process significantly but it was still a mind numbing slog to get any significant number of pages formatted in a day. Then one day whilst having lunch and idling through the menu options of Word 6.0 I happened across an option I was unfamiliar with… “Record Macro”. Intrigued, I obviously clicked it to see what would happen. Slightly disappointingly, smoke did not immediately emanate from the back of the PC, nor were the innermost secrets of the universe finally revealed across the screen. Disappointingly (Initially at least) I was presented with the ability to record a series of actions within the document which could then be repeated by clicking an assigned hotkey or button. On further experimentation I discovered how useful macros would become in my day-to-day life at Xerox allowing me to record many different Edit/Replace actions along with finding specific words, highlighting, underlining, and other useful operations. Every day I found more and more ways to navigate the document and apply formatting in different areas all of which reduced the time to complete even very large and previously tear inducing documents.
Implementing Macros into my daily routine meant that I shot ahead of every other member of my team in my page count processed per day. Colleagues sat in my immediate vicinity would ask why my screen kept looking like the PC was having some kind of weird seizure for a couple of minutes before looking sparkly and 90% complete after having just opened the document, so I shared my discovery with any team members that took an interest so they too could enjoy the benefits of macros.
Before long the management also got wind of the increased page counts emanating from my cubicle and spreading to nearby PC’s. After coming clean about why my daily page counts were so high, at the tender age of 22, I was promoted to a kind of team mentor tasked with teaching everyone in the team about Macros. By this time I had also started tinkering with the WordBasic language that was stored behind the scenes so I could tweak specific parts of the macro if I wanted a little more control and so my software meddling if not full-on development days had officially started… if you don’t count writing small programs on a Sinclair ZX81 in the early 80’s with my sister to make the screen change colour or answer simple questions in Sinclair Basic.
Even with the added benefits of macros, we were still subject to the (sometimes unusual) actions of the workers who were a constant source of issues that had to be unravelled. One time that springs to mind was when another young team member who shall remain nameless came to me asking if I could help. “I just can’t change the size of my page header!?” was the issue. I tried to remedy the header sizing problem in the normal manner but to no avail, it seemed that the header was stuck at a much larger size than it normally would be and wouldn‘t budge. Then, I thought I would switch on the hidden symbols for the document (The button that looks a bit like a backwards P on the ribbon at the top of the page). On doing so I noticed that the header was full of carriage return symbols, so did an edit/replace to remove all of them, removing a total count of over 32,000. Thanking me and ensuring me he had absolutely no idea why Word had placed all the carriage returns in the header, he carried on with his work. As I walked back to my desk, Cilla approached me and told me that she saw what had happened. She told me she had noticed him nodding tiredly whilst in the middle of formatting a document and, mid-type, his head had lolled forward as he dissolved into comfortable unconsciousness with his right index finger firmly planted on the carriage return key, awaking several minutes later with a start and an unexpectedly large header. Therein the mystery was solved.
Soon after starting at Rank Xerox, the first CD writers started to appear. It seemed like an excellent choice as a medium with which to supply clients with their electronic documentation, if a bit pricey, with each disk costing roughly the same as the defence budget for a small country. The in-house IT department rapidly set to work setting up a specific machine to ‘burn’ CD’s, which sounds more exciting than it is. It soon became apparent that the early CD writers were a little sensitive to motion which would cause the burn (write) process to fail if anyone touched the desk, walked past the desk, thought about walking past the desk, etc. After the third tremor-laden failed burn attempt, a taped off eight metre exclusion zone was erected around the PC and CD writer manned by guard posts and attack dogs… Ok, I made that last bit up, but no one was allowed to cross the line on pain of disciplinary action for fear of causing another sensitive write operation to be rendered useless. It is difficult to believe such issues ever existed moving files from one place to another given the wealth of simple options available to us today.
I have fond memories of my time at Rank Xerox, mainly of the characters I met but also the feeling of accomplishment I attained from discovering new things and helping others improve and manage their work-lives more comfortably. When I left after roughly two years, it was to start a new adventure in a new city as a trainee software developer which I will detail in the future.
I believe it is healthy to reflect on our lives which may have seemed mundane and monotonous at the time where we found parts of ourselves we didn’t really know existed, each of which pushed us forwards, towards the place we are today. If we ever feel negative about ourselves in the present, we can always find achievements from the past to comfort ourselves that we have the ability to overcome and move forwards.