I work on computers all day. So do my coworkers. This morning, I came into work and found someone had left some papers on my chair, which seems to be universal for “You should look at these”. I, naturally, assumed it was something reasonably important. Perhaps some security form I needed to fill out.
It turns out it was a printout of a sixteen page SQL stored procedure which my coworker printed just so he could highlight the 8th and 9th lines of the first page and write a little note informing me of something I did not ask to know, need to know, or want to know.
He had a bunch of options here. The first one, and my preference, would have been to just not tell me at all. The world would have continued to turn.
Second, he could have emailed me the stored procedure with a note in the email. That would have been fine. He could have come by my desk this morning and said, “Hey, open up that stored procedure. See this line? I changed it. It works better now.” I would have even been sort of okay if he’d printed out the first page only and made his notes there. An unnecessary use of paper, but not egregious.
Anyway, now I have to recycle this stack of papers. All so he could notify me of something I never needed to know.