I had the opportunity of doing some work in a HR-like department recently which handles the manpower administration for a military unit. It is one of those rare places in the military where you get see technology, in the form of computers systems and networks, being employed.

A particular subset of the work there involves generating reports for soldiers being released from service. The system involved doing data entry from a couple of different documents into a web-based form, and the downloading the completed report in a word document, and then opening the document and doing a lot of formatting, before finally printing it out. Then do the similar for maybe about a hundred over documents. In other words, it’s a laborious job, and one that would likely qualify for an entry on thedailywtf.com.

When the process was being explained and shown to me, voices in my head sighed. Coming from a sysadmin/programming background, one important thing you learn is to automate whatever you can, especially repetitive tasks such as this. This was a prime candidate for scripting action, and an area where Visual Studio’s integration with MS Office could be set to good use. It’s a pity that the computer was locked down rather tightly without any chance of doing so though.

Sad.