[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. This is what Counts, a podcast created by Trailblazer Consulting. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries. We talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company. We share our experience solving information management challenges like creating and implementing a records retention schedule, creating an asset data hierarchy, or helping with email management. This is Lee, and in this episode, Maura and I are going to go back and forth on some of the strangest information governance experiences we've had at different, different locations. I don't think we'll give any locations out or company names or anything like that, but some of these have been pretty odd. How do you feel about that, Maura? How do you feel about this subject?
[00:00:48] Speaker B: I feel that we've been saving these stories up for just this moment.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: There you go. Any spooky ones? You know, because it's around Halloween. Any spooky ones do you know of?
[00:00:59] Speaker B: I do have a spooky one. I'm going to save it till the end and I'm not even sure you know about it.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Okay, all right, fair enough.
Well, let's see. I remember going out to a parking lot, hot baking sun on this blacktop parking lot, and seeing a multitude of, I'll call them shipping containers, large scale shipping containers, just parked in this parking lot, stacked with material inside them. So not only did this place have storage facilities that they used, meaning professional vendor storage, off site storage companies that they use, but they also used parking lots full of these cargo containers. And you would walk in them and yeah, you could see the, you could see the sky from some of them.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: So you could definitely see the sky from some of them. From pinholes to giant holes, rust spots.
And you were standing there, typically with eight to 12 boxes stacked up, completely surrounding you.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Absolutely. There was just this tiny little row in the middle that you could walk through, but back to the end. Right. They were stacked, I don't know, like three rows deep. So you, you had to take some out to get to the back and so forth.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Get to the back? Yep. It was like the. There's cliches in the world of records management about how boxed up records always get the worst treatment. They're in the basement where they get flooded. They're in the attic where there's a roof leak. We were living it in those, Those sea vans out in the parking lots. Absolutely.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: One of those SE vans. I'll just. I don't throw this in. I don't know if you remember one of those sea vans One of our team went into with a client, and there was some very weird, musty smells coming out. They were both very concerned that they'd been exposed to something hazardous, and we had to actually go through a whole protocol with them.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: I do remember that. Yes, yes. Me being, you know, wearing the multiple hats at this company, one of them being somewhat HR related. I was pulled into that very quickly.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: Exactly.
Records management is not supposed to be an adventure sport, but here you go.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Right.
Continuing on.
Pretty much that same location had its own storage warehouse where they packed boxes.
And it was the oddest thing in the world to see empty shelves all over the place. And for them to tell you there were no room for any additional boxes.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: There was no room. We walked in there, and there were two huge pallets of boxes that had been delivered to this place waiting to be shelved. And we said, why are these sitting here? And they said, oh, we have no room. And we literally looked around, and as far as we could see through the entire warehouse, which turned out there were some boxes way in the back, but in the, you know, near front, 10 to 12 aisles around us. Completely empty. No. No boxes on any shelves. That was. That was one of those. Are we. Can we believe our eyes? Are. You know, is this a mirage? What are we missing here? Kind of moments. It turned into this one we actually may have talked about on the podcast before, because it turned into a very confusing data management process that the warehouse was using because they were equating shelf number with box number.
[00:04:54] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: And so as a box came in, they assigned it a shelf number, but they didn't have two pieces of data, they had one. So box number equals shelf number. Over time, as a box got destroyed, it freed up the shelf number and also the box number. So if another box came in, they assigned it the same box number as the one that had been destroyed. It's a very tricky process to actually manage what you're doing and understand what was stored and what was destroyed and also where to find it. It was really good at where to find it, but it really was not so good at what was sent in and what was sent out.
And so that was. That was both a. Just. That was just bizarre on many levels.
[00:05:42] Speaker A: It was just bizarre. But as a box, you knew your home. You always had a home to go.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: To, unless you didn't, and you were sitting on the pallet in the front of the hallway.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: True.
[00:05:54] Speaker B: There was no room for you.
So, yeah, let's see. So one of my earliest ones was helping a group clean out old files. And they were trying to follow a retention schedule for the first time. And they did a couple of interesting things in this place. They. They ripped up timesheets because they thought they. Because the rule was shred them, and they didn't have a shredder, so they just tore them manually and put them into trash bags, which actually does not. That doesn't meet the requirement for shredding. But they were trying. But this was the same group where I discovered. And then this became one of my rules of thumb for inventories and cleanup. If you haven't found the Christmas ornaments and the gorilla suit in the file room, then you're not done.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: So, yes, there's definitely been some strange things that have been pulled back from. From storage. And what's funny is when you look at the index, right, you don't even pull them back yet. You look at the index at your, you know, your desk or whatever it may be, and it just says, you know, important Christmas stuff or important Halloween material or something like that. Like, it's really the vaguest description of it. And so you re. You really do have to spend the money to pull it back to see what all these decorations are.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: You really. At least you have to. Well, sometimes they wouldn't say Christmas or Halloween. They would say, like employee welfare, employee morale, or something like that. And then you need to understand, is that benefits or is that the Christmas ornaments? You can't tell without looking at the box. Yeah, that same place also had a.
They also had a training facility around something. And they took me into this building with the training facility, and the first thing I saw in a dark room was a bunch of barrels with. It looked like bodies upside down in the barrels. They were mannequins dressed in gas masks and.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. I don't actually remember hearing about this.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: I think this was before we met. I was actually very young. This stuff happened when I was very, very young that I went to this place and ran into the Christmas ornaments, the gorilla suit, and the training room with the barrels of mannequins stuck in these barrels. And it was. It was an emergency response training. And so it was just. They were just storing the victims.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: Basically makes me feel better. But at the same time, that's a little scary.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Yes. And there's one more story, but I am saving that one for the end in that same place. So.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: Okay, so what about. Strange as you're in meetings talking about, I don't know, requirements, or you're talking about, you know, you're there For a vision, visionary meeting, setting a vision and so forth. And then all of a sudden it just turns into something else.
[00:09:00] Speaker B: So, yeah, talking about electronic records management, or pretty early on in the world of electronic records management. So maybe 15 years ago, maybe even longer, very serious people talking about how important it is to preserve these records and how do we do that from preserving the essential characteristics of the record and maybe not focused on format and very sophisticated processes for managing locations over time because you don't want broken links. Broken links were a big problem in the early ages of cloud based computing or storage or the Internet or that concept, even if it was private.
And all of a sudden we get the lead developer who's been focused on the essential characteristics and the universal record locators. He starts to talk about pontoon boats. And I was not the only one in the room who was confused because we had been talking about universal record locators.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: No relation.
[00:10:05] Speaker B: This discussion about the benefits of pontoon boats over deeper keeled fishing boats.
I was out of my depth, no pun intended, immediately.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: But there was no relation to the electronic records in the pontoon boat. It was just out of the blue, right?
[00:10:25] Speaker B: It was just a non sequitur. We had been talking about electronic records for a long time and he decided it was time to talk about pontoon boats. He needed a break mentally. I don't know.
It did make everybody laugh. Actually, that's not true. It made me laugh. It made many other people in the room divide quickly into the sides of pontoon boat versus traditional fishing boats. They had a lot more knowledge and experience on that than I did.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Okay, that's good.
[00:10:56] Speaker B: I mean, one of your favorites, I know, is about the, the mountain of invoices and packing slips.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, we've been in warehouses before, but this was, this was a warehouse in, you know, I can't say any locations or anything like that, but just off the beaten path. You know how warehouses are, they're typically in a secluded area. Well, this was absolutely a secluded area. And I won't say it was a beaten down warehouse, but it was, it was older, was completely wooden instead of, you know, cement and so forth.
But yeah, there was just in the middle, a pile, pile of. To me, there were chairs, there was everything we wanted to throw away in one pile. And then there were just invoices and packing slips and just boxes and boxes of overflowing material in another pile. And it was just this mountain. I would say it was, it was like 10 yards by 10 yards, just a mountain of stuff. That we pretty much had to sort through and figure out.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And around the edges of that warehouse, I think I remember if I'm picturing the right place, it was like a maze of file cabinets that were set up in, like, a maze, like, crisscrossing aisles. And.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: Absolutely. There's no logic to it.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: Organized in quotes.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: According to somebody's logic. But we were having a hard time figuring out what the logic was and how to efficiently find the records they needed because they were entering a litigation and identify the ones they could get rid of because they were shutting down the warehouse.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. I mean, if you wanted a chair or a table, you literally went to the pile, pulled it out, and started using it. I mean, it was just.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: That is true.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: An awkward situation.
Very awkward situation. So. All right, so I stopped.
I stopped you from saying this in one of our episodes. Nobody's going to know that except you and I. Right. But what is the story about box tops being box tops? Yes.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: Box tops in the shower. This is another one of my little pet phrases for when. For our work. Box tops in the shower means we have made a terrible error. We've gone.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Okay. All right.
[00:13:16] Speaker B: So we were working on a project, and we have talked about this project and the way to.
To sift through massive quantities of information across a large area. And this was a. I think we talked about it as a statistical sampling. I think we talked about it in an episode about statistical sampling and back files and how to get through them. And so we have this big campus, and we were collecting potential, you know, records that were potentially relevant to some questions we were trying to answer. And I wasn't on site all the time. There was a team on site all the time, and they were sent out in pairs. And we had that escalation process of if you were. We had categorized the buildings by how likely they were to have this information. And we sent teams out. If they found something, then they did a higher level of sampling. And if they found more, then we inventoried the whole thing. Well, they also were collecting anything that they thought was relevant and bringing it back to our sort of location, our headquarters building that we had. And I got there before we had the night before. We were having a very big, like, progress meeting with extremely senior people in this organization. And they brought me into the room where they had everything laid out. And I said, okay, okay, walk me through what's happening here. Show me how these are organized. Where did you find them? You know, like, the. The escalation process and the provenance and all of that was good. Like, everything had. Had gone according to plan, and it was documented. And then I said, okay, but here's a question. Why are all these file boxes open?
And they said, oh, the box tops are in the shower.
And I said, what? What. What does that mean? And so then they showed me. They walked me into this unused bathroom that was in this building, and literally, it was stacked floor to ceiling with box tops that had been made, you know, folded and made to put on top of the box, just stacked up in the. In the shower. And I said, why?
Why are these box tops here?
And they said it was because they wanted to use hanging file folders in the boxes so that it would be prettier, it would be neater, it would be easier to sort through, but you couldn't put the tops on the boxes. Well, okay, but this is where the error came in. Because our job wasn't to make this easy to sort through or pretty to look at. Our job was to protect the information and make sure that we could, you know, document the chain of custody. Where did we get it? Why did we take it? You know, what part of a sampling was it, and how did it get here? And that nothing had happened. So open boxes didn't really do that for us. Now, it was a building that was dedicated to us. There were no people coming in and out, so the risk was low that something had been moved around. But the fact that it was all open was really not what I wanted to highlight to the very senior people coming in. So I do have a picture somewhere of the box tops in the shower, because it was a very. It was just a really good visual reminder of. To remember what your purpose is in information governance, not focus on these other sort of presentation details where we're the nuts and bolts team. We're not the. We're not the front of the front of the house.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: That is hilarious. Yes. So box tops in the shower is your safe term? Your safe.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: Yes. And so one of our colleagues that was in charge of that project, and he and I worked on it together for a long time, whenever I say the box tops are in the shower, he gets, like, a little twitch.
It's like, don't talk about that.
So, all right.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: At the grand finale. Yes, I've been waiting for it.
[00:17:23] Speaker B: Okay, so the same place that had the sort of mannequin bodies in the barrels, they took me on a larger tour of their campus, I guess their setup one day to a warehouse, actually, that had been abandoned. And they were like. But there's some important. We think there's some important stuff in here. You need to come and look at it. So we drove, literally drove to this place, to this giant metal building.
Huge doors went in. There's one light hanging in the ceiling like 30ft up in the air. And we literally had flashlights. There were abandoned desks and chairs. As in that other warehouse, this was a different organization. And the person who's leading me through is leading me through here. And he's like, but I just want you to see what's back here in this loading bay. This warehouse had loading docks. And so we were on the inside looking at the loading bay. He's like, I think you might need to see this. It seems like it's important. As we're getting closer and closer to the loading bay, I'm noticing that there is a river of something on the floor. Oh, yeah. And it was glowing just a little bit in the light from the ceiling. From the one light from the ceiling. And he's like, see, look, there are floppy discs over there. These were getting into how long I've been doing this and how this was one of my first jobs, but still, it was a long time ago. 9 inch Wang floppy discs.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: And they did say the one that I could read from where I was, you know, contract number, blah, blah, blah, original deliverable, Final deliverable. And a name.
That disc that said that was sitting in the glowing liquid. And I said, that disc is not readable. We're done.
Let's get out of here.
Because, yeah, Glowing liquid abandoned docking loading dock bays. No, those are not. Those records were not protected. Again, thinking about our job as information governance professionals, nobody protected those records. They just abandoned them, potentially in this haunted warehouse on the. The play on the campus of the place with the mannequins and the barrels that was leaking. Nuclear introduction. Leaking. Who knows what they were leaking. It was an emergency response location, as I said. So, yeah, it was. It was quite the introduction to the world of records management.
I could handle anything after that. Pretty much.
[00:19:53] Speaker A: That's a good conclusion.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: Up until the boxes tops in the shower.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: We want to hear about your odd, strange information governance stories. Please send us an email if you have any questions or if you have any stories to share. Please send us an email at
[email protected] or look us up on the web and use our contact form at www.trailblazer.us.com thank you for listening and please tune into our next episode. Also, if you like this one, please be a champion share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you, the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake, who created our music.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: Thanks everyone.
