13th February, 2002.
 
"It's no good, I can't find the serial number!"

"It's there. I'm looking at it now."

"That's so weird! I can't see it at all." There's a pause while realisation begins to dawn. You can almost hear rusty mental gears grinding against one another in protest. "Hey, where are you reading that file from?"

"From the place you copied it to because you said it would be easier for everyone else to access it there."

"Ohhhh... Then what's this one I'm reading?"

"It wouldn't be the original "inaccessible" one you didn't delete after everyone started modifying the copy six months ago, would it?"

Silence.

At least the client patiently standing beside the Cow-orker's desk waiting for the serial number looks amused, so the exercise wasn't a complete waste.

---

Storing relevant work documents in one location rather than spraying them randomly across a variety of local and network drives, e-mails and filing cabinets allows you to quickly locate required information and provide accurate summaries, thereby avoiding near-misses such as the following:

"We were told to do it this way! I've got the directive from executive management saying just that!"

[20 minutes later]

"I still can't find it - you must have it in your files."

"No, I was on leave when that happened, remember? And I've already checked in case you hid it in my files, anyway, and it's not there."

"Oh. Where is it?"

I don't know. Why would I know where you'd hide something like that when I wasn't even here at the time. I continue trying to get on with my work while an indignant and uninterrupted monologue floats over the cubicle wall.

[5 minutes later]

"Oops. That was just my faulty recollection of things. What I thought was a final decision was just an email I sent to someone else entirely asking if they thought that was what we should do. Lucky I held off on telling the director we were only doing what he'd told us, wasn't it?"

Lucky is such a subjective term.