July 6, 2011
Dear Everyone:
Time marches on. And, if you
don’t keep step with it, you risk getting run over.
In the Beginning was the Mainframe. And Life was Good.
In the late 1980’s, when I started working for the Corporate Records Management group, we used the Company computer quite a lot. In fact, just about everything, including a rudimentary form of email, was run on the “mainframe”. Here’s how it worked:
You made “offerings” to the “high priests” of the “mainframe” and, in return, you were granted access to your data. That access was generally in the form of a “dumb terminal”, so called because it couldn’t talk back to you and incessantly ask if everything was “OK?”.
In most cases, it was easier to see the data by running a report, which
would eventually show up in your office in the form of a large stack of
paper. It used to be worse:
The paper stack would be 11” by 17”.
But in recent times improvements had been made and the paper
stack would be the traditional 8-½” by 11”.
Still, it was a lot of paper stacks that had to go somewhere.
Around this time, “Jeannie” had discovered something she called “CEA”, short for “Cheap European Antiques”. Shopping for a piece of furniture, she had been shocked at the prices charged for inexpensive, poorly-made furniture, often with actual cardboard used in place of wood. But in some antique shop she found something so well-made that it had stood “the test of time” and still worked well. So we had gotten into the habit of frequenting some antique shops in the area.
One day, I found what had once been a “tea cart”.
It was a wooden cart, with spindle-carved struts,
three shelves and wheels that
allowed you to roll everything for serving afternoon tea from the
kitchen to wherever people took their tea.
It was also ideal for holding multiple stacks of paper neatly and
orderly. I promptly took it
into my office, to which it gave a “touch of class”.
It held many an important report, or twelve, until paper became a
”thing of the past”. Then it
held other things. In any
office, you can always use a handy horizontal surface to set things down
on, however “temporarily”.
I’ve kept that cart with me for over 20 years, always finding a spot for
it in various offices and/or cubicles, even if it had to stay “under the
stairs” for a little while.
And I know exactly where it will go in my condo when I bring it home
with me. You can never have
too many handy horizontal surfaces around the house.
In other news…
My “home” email system developed a bit of a “bump” a couple of weeks
ago. The
Internet Service
Provider (ISP) introduced a “new and improved” front end to its email
service that promptly got into a war with the version of
Internet
Explorer that my computer was using.
I could get to the email on an older version, but the newest
version would launch into a hopeless loop.
(Time marches on, but sometimes it trips over itself.)
As of last night, it looked like “they fixed it” whoever “they” are and
whatever “it” was.
Counting today, I have five days left in the office.
I am beginning to eye things, like the aforementioned tea cart,
with a view of “do I really have any further use for this?”
In some cases, “you bet!”
In others, “not really.”
In the meantime, my soon-to-be-former-co-workers are eyeing my office, wondering what will be left to scavenge as soon as I’m out the door. We’ll see.
Love, as always,
Pete
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