The first test was nerve-wracking.

“What’s this?” Leo asked.

“Have you looked for a Remark Office OMR alternative ?” asked Leo, the intern who was too smart for his coffee-fetching role.

Every month, 5,000 sheets of paper arrived. Each sheet was a grid of bubbles waiting to be filled in with a No. 2 pencil. And every month, the OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) scanner—a hulking beast named Bertha—would jam, misread, or simply chew a perfect rectangle out of someone’s crucial feedback.

It took Leo an hour to jury-rig a USB adapter. Then they printed the new surveys—not as bubble sheets, but as stiff 80-column cards. The questions were the same. But instead of filling a bubble, clients used a simple hand punch (a repurposed hole reinforcer) to punch out a tiny circle next to their answer.