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ocument. 200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A Project Manager had overseen the technical writer. 200 hours, at $31 an hour, made: $6,200.
2. A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting had cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.
3. Two days of editing cost $367.
4. A box of order labels cost five dollars.
5. Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the BellSouth bureaucracy, cost $129.
6. Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.
7. Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each, totalling $43.
Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing of a twelve-page document had taken a full week. Writing it had taken five weeks, including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but watch the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had taken two days. Printing and mailing an electronic document (which was already available on the Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee who needed it), had cost over a thousand dollars.
But this was just the beginning. There were also the HARDWARE EXPENSES. Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor. THIRTY-ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS for a sophisticated VAXstation II computer. Six thousand dollars for a computer printer. TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create the twelve-page Document.
Plus ten percent of the cost of the software and the hardware, for maintenance. (Actually, the ten percent maintenance costs, though mentioned, had been left off the final $79,449 total, apparently through a merciful oversight).
Mr. Megahee's letter had been mailed directly to William Cook himself, at the office of the Chicago federal attorneys. The Un
