Another part of the problem is institutional inertia. It’s just hard to change how people do things. Let me tell you the story of when I was a technical writer many years ago, and we were implementing a computer system at a small town register of deeds. The town’s deeds were on paper and filed in cabinets. It was manual and unwieldy, making tracing deeds a process that could take weeks because people had to manually dig through the paper morass.

The computer system was clearly better, but the workers at the front desk who dealt with the public weren’t sold. Part of their job was to stamp completed documents with a rubber stamp, which they did with great gusto, before they were sent away to be filed. For these clerks, who had worked the counter for 20 or 30 years, the stamp represented their identity and sense of power. They didn’t want to give it up.