They ask: What was this paperwork of which you speak? This “pushing papers” people once supposedly engaged in - didn’t things get lost, forgotten, overlooked?Īnswer: Yes, sometimes. This all must sound so archaic and pointless to the Gen Z employee heading off to work in the cloud. Who knew when one scrap or another might prove useful? Birth certificates, tax receipts, diplomas, fading photocopies of Social Security cards. Most of us paper-based people accumulated our fair share of these cabinets, which held, as such things do, a carefully organized history of one’s past: artwork, by grade camp letters, by year cards, birthday cards, Valentine’s Day cards, other insurance forms house deeds medical records. It was no longer Mom’s job to keep track of your life’s paperwork. (Let’s not forget that the portal into John Malkovich’s mind lurked behind - why, yes - a file cabinet.) For a young adult, acquiring your first metal contraption, or one of those brown accordion files with the little figure-eight string closure, was part of becoming a grown-up. And only after you’d climbed a few rungs on the corporate ladder could you let all this filing go to someone else, another rung down.īut filing wasn’t just for the office files were part of our innermost personal lives. You’d painstakingly recenter those metal rods, always prone to slipping free you’d occasionally handwrite a label onto the perforated fragment of paper nested inside each plastic tab, folding it just so and inserting it, only to see it worm out the other end. You filed and filed until your thumbs wore down. There was always a warren of them in a back room somewhere, and no matter what your eventual profession, if you ever served time as an intern, an executive assistant, a clerk or a catalog manager, you filed. ![]() ![]() Remember filing cabinets? Those lumbering, clattering towers of drawers stuffed full of Pendaflex folders? They were once vital to every workplace, as much a part of the landscape as desks and chairs.
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