Office dream

Woke this morning to an office dream, a world which I have been out of for more than ten years now. A world which, in my case, was the civil service.

For some reason, I had been transferred from a relatively modern department - in the sense of the office technology which had been deployed there - to a relatively old-fashioned department, using technology which I had not used for five years or more. I got very frustrated about how difficult I found it to wind back five years and get back into the swing of things as they were then. Things like where did I keep the standard letters and minutes to use in my correspondence? Where did I file my copies of my correspondence?

Waking up from all this was rather slow, and it took me some while to disentangle myself from my former world and get back into the present. Some while during which the frustration continued, it taking me a long time to piece together what fragments I could lay my hands on.

So in the beginning we had paper files, with important files being registered and looked after by the central registry. Paper files contained copies of letters and minutes, letter and minutes which might be addressed to people, to places in the organisation or both. Both in the sense of a particular person in his or her designated place in the organisation, usually known by an acronym of up to half a dozen letters and numbers, for example EOG5. The file would sometimes embody a chunk of work and would be sent around the office as that work progressed. Important people added  manuscript comments to the papers therein, in ink, in their own special colour if they were really important. And there were less important people called paperkeepers. See reference 1.

Paper files went with secretaries, typists and typing pools, with these last two vanishing in the 1990's. Carbon paper and stone age photocopiers.

Then we moved onto word processing. Then integrated office systems, combining word processing and email. Then along came Windows and Microsoft. Where I was at the time, we were very big on document management systems, effectively corporate document repositories, replacing the file registries of old.

Then we moved from the transitional world which replicated the world of paper with computers, to a new world in which electronic documents took on a new life of their own, a world which in my case was dominated by email.

This much I can piece together, but beyond that it is all a bit of a fog, the details have all gone. For example, having been in EOG5 for a few years, I can remember what that was, but I am having trouble with EOG1, EOG2, EOG3 and EOG4. Was there an EOG6? Maybe if a bunch of us from any one of these phases got together, we could put it all back together over beer. As it is, it will remain a fog.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-paperkeepers-tale.html.