[Feathers]

My father refuses to use a computer at all. We do not have one in the office at work.
Until our secretary retired in 2007 they were still typing letters/invoices/faxes out on a typewriter. Even then, Dad's 1.5 finger typing speed made him angry about wasting his time, when he could have written it by hand much faster.
Now I use my laptop for the invoices, but the new secretary writes everything else by hand.

Jobs are confirmed in writing by fax, and handwritten in a diary.

We often get people ring asking for an email address to send us junk.
The reply, "we don't have one" floors them.
Even Telstra: "We don't have an address on file for you."
"Yeah, because we don't have email."
"uh..I know, but we need one for your file"
"...I can't give you something we don't have!"
"....."

And the idiots that ring saying "we can make you a website/sell you software, and put everything in the cloud, and make life 'so much easier'..." don't seem to understand when he says we don't have a computer either. They just keep going with their spiel.

Email is too hit and miss. If we leave the office for the day at 3pm and someone sends an email to cancel a job that's due to depart at 7am the next morning, no one is going to see it. The driver leaves the yard at 6.15am, and doesn't have keys to the office...

We turned up for a job a few months ago, where we had to drive across Sydney for the pick up, and waited for 40 minutes, before someone came out and said "Oh, no we cancelled that weeks ago. We sent an email".
Don't know who they sent it to, but it certainly wasn't us... Then they wanted to argue when they got a bill for $400 because we turned up and the driver had to be paid for his time.

It's also happened more than once that schools have faxed for quotes on jobs, which we faxed back, and then never bothered to book it. So the day comes and they have 60+ kids on the side of the road waiting to go on their camp/excursion, and there's no bus. Had they called and checked up, then the error would have been found.



And don't get me started on the time I listed an old bus on ebay, with as much information as I was given, and a message in BIG font saying to call the office to speak to the boss or mechanic for more specific information, not to email (because obviously I have no idea), and got abused by some moron who accused me of being a fraud.

It would have taken me at least 24 hours to get the information from anyone, and reply, and they probably wouldn't have understood it anyway, or be confused about something, and that would draw the whole thing out longer.
Call the office, ask your question, someone who knows can answer and give you all the information you want (and probably more than you ever wanted to know) on the spot. Simples.