When Remote Work Still Required a Wet Signature

In June 2020, remote life had become compulsory for large parts of the world.

Classes moved online.

Meetings moved online.

Documents moved online.

At one university I referred to without naming, electronic signatures existed at least formally.

Remote education had already begun.

And people were still being called physically to the university for things justified by wet signatures and face-to-face meetings.

That contradiction irritated me enough to write about it.

The old entry was angry.

Too angry, perhaps.

It concluded that we were incapable of adapting and would drown in our own habits while the world continued without us.

The tone belonged to June 2020.

Many people were tired.

Systems had been forced to change suddenly.

Every unnecessary physical requirement looked not merely inefficient but absurd.

The interesting part now is not the national insult.

It is the institutional contradiction.

A system can possess digital tools without becoming digital.

That distinction is essential.

Buying software is easy.

Changing a process is difficult.

An electronic signature can exist technically while the organization continues behaving as though paper is the real document.

A video-conferencing system can exist while decisions still require everyone in the same room.

A form can be online while somebody eventually prints it.

Digital transformation fails when analog assumptions survive underneath digital interfaces.

This was visible everywhere in the early pandemic.

Organizations discovered which processes were genuinely digital and which were only decorated with computers.

A PDF attached to an email is not necessarily a digital process.

If someone prints it, signs it, scans it, emails it, and another person prints it again, technology has only accelerated the paper ritual.

The logic remains physical.

That may be the most important lesson from the entry.

Technology does not transform institutions by being present.

People have to trust the new representation.

What is an original?

What counts as approval?

Where does authority live?

Who is responsible if the digital version is wrong?

These are organizational questions, not software questions.

A wet signature feels reassuring because institutions have centuries of habit around paper.

There is an object.

Ink.

A hand.

A page.

Digital approval can feel abstract even when technically more traceable.

So people keep the old ritual.

Not always from stupidity.

Sometimes from regulation.

Sometimes from fear.

Sometimes because upstream and downstream processes still expect paper.

Sometimes because nobody wants to be the first person blamed for accepting the new method.

The source does not tell me why that university required the physical steps.

I should not invent the reason.

It records only what the requirement looked like from my perspective:

e-signature existed.

Remote education existed.

Yet wet signatures and face-to-face meetings still brought people to campus.

That was the contradiction.

The pandemic made these contradictions visible because physical presence suddenly acquired cost.

Before 2020, an unnecessary trip might be annoying.

During the pandemic, it could feel irresponsible.

Every process had to justify the sentence:

Why must this person be here?

That question changed work.

Not because remote work had just been invented.

It had existed for decades.

Because necessity removed many excuses for not testing it.

Organizations that had insisted a job could not be done remotely discovered within weeks that large portions could.

Then another lesson appeared:

being able to work remotely during an emergency is not the same as designing good remote work.

Emergency remote work often copied office habits onto screens.

Same meetings.

Same hours.

Same approvals.

Same management assumptions.

Only now everyone was at home.

Real process redesign asks deeper questions.

Why does this meeting exist?

Why does this signature exist?

Why is this approval sequential?

Why must everyone be present at the same time?

Can the system record consent differently?

Can the person complete the task without asking permission for each step?

The best digital transformation often removes steps rather than digitizing them.

That is much harder politically.

A useless paper form converted to PDF remains useless.

But nobody loses a role.

Delete the form and somebody must admit it was unnecessary.

Institutions resist that admission.

Processes acquire owners.

Owners acquire routines.

Routines acquire legitimacy through age.

“We have always done it this way” is one of the most durable technologies ever invented.

It requires no maintenance and survives every software migration.

The 2020 entry was written from frustration, but underneath it is a useful diagnostic:

If an institution says it has digitalized, follow one ordinary task from beginning to end.

Where does paper reappear?

Where does physical presence reappear?

Where does someone manually type information already stored elsewhere?

Where does a manager have to approve something merely because managers have always approved it?

That map tells you more than the software catalog.

True digitalization changes the path.

Not only the screen.

Universities are particularly interesting here because they contain both highly technical knowledge and deeply traditional administration.

A university may teach artificial intelligence in one building while requiring a stamped form in another.

This is not uniquely Turkish or uniquely academic.

Large institutions accumulate eras.

One office lives in 2020.

Another in 1998.

A third in 1974.

All connected by email.

That coexistence is normal.

Change does not arrive uniformly.

The pandemic compressed the pressure.

Suddenly the 1974 process had to interact with lockdown.

That produced absurdity.

Wet signature.

Face-to-face meeting.

Remote education.

Pick any two.

There is also a management lesson.

Physical presence is easy to observe.

Work is harder.

A person sitting in an office looks employed.

A person at home produces output that must be evaluated through actual results.

Remote work exposes weak management because it removes visibility as a substitute for measurement.

Managers who cannot define outcomes often fall back on presence.

Are you online?

Why is your status away?

Join the meeting.

Turn the camera on.

These behaviors recreate the office’s visual reassurance.

But activity is not productivity.

Presence is not contribution.

The wet signature has a cousin:

the visible employee.

Both are physical symbols used to reassure systems that struggle to measure the underlying reality.

Ink stands for authorization.

Chair occupancy stands for work.

Sometimes the symbol is useful.

Sometimes it becomes ritual.

The mature response to my old anger is not “everything should be remote.”

That would be another simplistic rule.

Some work benefits from physical presence.

Laboratories.

Clinical work.

Hands-on education.

Equipment.

Certain creative sessions.

Human relationships.

Some decisions are easier in the same room.

The question is not remote versus office as ideology.

The question is purpose.

Why are we gathering?

Why are we signing?

What problem does physical presence solve here?

If there is a good answer, go.

If the answer is merely habit, redesign.

The pandemic gave institutions a forced experiment.

Some lessons lasted.

Some old habits returned.

That is also normal.

People do not optimize only for efficiency.

They optimize for comfort, power, familiarity, social connection, and risk.

A face-to-face meeting may be inefficient and still satisfy needs participants struggle to name.

So the goal is not to abolish ritual.

It is to know when ritual is being mistaken for necessity.

The June 2020 entry caught one such moment.

The university could teach at a distance.

It could formally use e-signatures.

Yet somewhere in the process, paper and presence still held authority.

That small contradiction summarized an entire stage of digital transition.

The future had arrived.

It still wanted us to come in and sign.