>>>Completely useless. Just finding what you need in there was nearly impossible.
>>
>>I mean 600pages could be something that might be split into separate units. I mean 60 units 10 page each is nothing to unusual. Thousands of A3 at once. Well, we all pray nobody needs this at once. But the most important output must be paper, comes in DIN A3 and yes it might be a big stack. The deal is not to print - each page must be hand signed by at least two persons ... And they must be sure what they sign. There is danger in it.
>
>Nowhere near that. Someone was exercising their perceived right to order anything from the common services (which was then us in the computing centre), just to show off or to try to double-check what was in the totals which we printed and delivered already. This is 1988, and there was just not enough capacity - the whole VAX had less than 1G of storage then, and it served four wholesale/retail members of the system (two others had their own PDPs). There was no way we could have kept the text files with the reports for long enough, we almost ran out of space printing this - we actually had to print one part, delete, run the report for the next section, print that, delete etc. Okay, two such at a time, and at times we just had to repeat the process with smaller chunks as it would run out of space.
>
>We could have just flatly refused to do this, but this served a higher purpose: nobody ever tried to ask for such a report again.
>
>Well actually someone did, but that was in a different company, three years later... and that one was just two boxes of paper. Same lesson, same effect, but this time it was chargeable and we didn't spare the idiot.

Nice work, then. Sometimes one must turn the brain off and just do as ordered. Will show itself. :)