It was very twentieth-century.
8 a.m. First to arrive at office. Head to the break room and fill cup with bad coffee. Maxwell’s maybe. Bitter, chemical taste. No one has heard of good coffee outside of Seattle.
8:30 After chatting to other employees with wet hair – a club you don’t necessarily want to belong to – you walk under the buzzing fluorescent lights to your cubicle. A huge typewriter dominates your desk. Paper clips and stickie notes are flung about in madcap fashion.
But one object stands out: the Rolodex. You LOVE the Rolodex. This revolving card file contains names and phone numbers of your “contacts,” as well as personal detritus such as library book due dates, doctor’s appointments, movie schedules, coupons, and the crossed-out names of a fun-loving CEO’s six ex-wives. Without the Rolodex, you would never remember if he is currently married to Brenda or Mindy.
Of course spreadsheets have replaced the Rolodex, an old-fashioned paper-based technology (invented in 1956). But the Rolodex is more fun. You can spin it around to find the card you’re looking for. And the Rolodex is your entertainment on a desert island. You will enjoy reading old invitations from an experimental theater producer begging you to attend a post-modern event. You would turn it down, but he or she is just so nice.
After the Rolodex was “retired” (a sad day for offices everywhere), I found a new use for it. Do you have trouble keeping track of the characters in book series?
You can make a special Rolodex.
THE ZOLA ROLODEX. Zola, a disturbing naturalistic writer, author of the absorbing 20-book Rougon-Macquart cycle, was inspired by Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. Zola subtitled his series The Nature and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire. There are hundreds of characters from different branches of the family: coal miners, journalists, department store salesmen, prostitutes, politicians, priests, and property speculators. It is not necessary to remember every detail but it is fun and useful to have Rolodex cross-references. Of course this information is on the internet, but it is arranged differently from my own.
I love the Rolodex!
you could call it the Zola-dex! I miss index cards. I used to keep book author/titles on them in a cardboard file box. they were going to be the sources for my dissertation on Edwardian fiction, but I moved out of state (ended up in a completely different career path) and left them at my mother’s house, and then she moved 5 or 6 times, so the card box is gone. I miss them though! sometimes i see a title online that brings on a flashback. Sigh. The road not taken-pure nostalgia.
I’m a fan of index cards, too. Yes, how else could you keep track of all your notes on Edwardian fiction without cards? Paper products are a good way of connecting with our thoughts. The computer is also great, but I’m nostalgic for paper.