A former colleague recently asked me to recommend her for entry into a master’s degree program, which I was happy to do. I asked her to remind me of the exact dates we’d worked together. She provided them, along with a letter of recommendation I’d written for her more than 15 years ago.
I was impressed. She had quickly located a single sheet of paper that was more than 15 years old. I can seldom find my backside with both hands and a GPS. Ask for a document more than a couple of hours old and I’ll begin by searching the files between “slim chance” and “none.”
The experience took me back to a day back in the early 1980s when I was working in employee communications at Sperry Flight Systems. At a company productivity conference I was covering, a marketing guy from Sperry Univac showed off our company’s first entry in the brand new personal computing market, the SperryLink.
The SperryLink wasn’t a personal computer. It was a remote terminal, which hooked into a mainframe, combined with a word processor that was positively primitive. Lacking internal storage capacity, it stored documents on huge 8x8-inch disks that were actually floppy and had to be stored in their own little filing cabinets. Each held about the same number of documents as a manila folder, as I recall.
Still, the SperryLink was a huge leap forward from the Correcting Selectric typewriter I was pounding at the time and I soon became the first non-secretary in the division to have one on my desk. One of the few times in life I was an early technology adopter.
At the presentation, the very enthusiastic marketing guy (is there another kind?) said, with dramatic certainty, that paper’s days were numbered. Thanks to personal computing, he predicted, we would see the paperless office within five years, 10 tops.
In the third decade after the birth of personal computer, there are still a few sheets of paper around my office. More than a few, actually. How about yours?
So I wonder when I hear predictions that other paper things – newspapers, magazines and books, for instance – will follow the pterodactyl off the scene in the foreseeable future.
If those predictions prove as accurate as the Univac guy’s, maybe we all should pick up a few shares of Dunder Mifflin at a bargain price.
I completely agree. I'm a hard copy girl and vow to never own a Kindle.
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ReplyDeleteI'm just impressed you can spell pterodactyl.
ReplyDeleteI find it best to employ an alarm system of sorts to guide me in my filing of paperwork. When one of the Empire State Building-like stacks on my credenza lists and topples over, it has become a safety hazard. That reminds - er, forces - me to sort through it all and return to safe mode.
Of course, it's hell when I'm forced to move offices like this weekend. You'd think the experience of wading through reams of edited brochure, speech, email and video copy would cure me. Most of it belongs in the thredder. Problem is, I hear that little voice from my agency days that says someone, someday before I retire will ask for one of those sheets as proof that a particular edit was authorized and made. So, just to be safe, there they sit ... and grow until they're a safety hazard.
Come to think of it, I wonder if these office moves are really part of a grand design to keep my office from being condemned. Hmmm...