A Moving Tale

Appeared in Volume 9/4, November 1996

Moving jobs was not a restful experience. The principal problem was shifting the colossal mass of paper from my old office (in Australia) to my new one (in Thailand).

Initially, I thought it would be a simple matter of deftly placing a few books and sheets of paper into one or two smallish boxes. However, as I surveyed my creaking bookshelves and overflowing filing cabinets, I realised the Herculean task that lay ahead.

Part of the trouble was selecting the irrelevant, out-dated, and boring stuff to be emptied into the rubbish skips: old lecture notes, circulars, user manuals, research proposals, grant rejection letters, and exam answer booklets. The answer booklets alone ran into the 100's. I can hardly believe that I marked each one - why didn't I die of boredom?

The filtering exercise soon took on the proportions of an archaeological dig. It was incredible how many meetings I had attended, and so few that I could remember. In fact, their similarity led to a sort of Platonic distillation, a prototypical meeting recollection. My role was to sit at the back and hope I wasn't asked to do anything.

Another surprise was the shifts in teaching content and format - goodbye Pascal, hello Miranda and C. Five years ago, I wrote overheads by hand and included lots of detail. Nowadays, my slides are created on-line and are virtually blank. However, one thing which has stayed the same is the moaning of students. When there was a plentiful supply of detail on the overheads, they wanted less. When there was less, they wanted more. Also, colour, multimedia, and dancing girls.

By the time the packing was finished, the office looked as 'paperless' as it would ever get, and yet there was still a significant quantity of paper lurking about the place. It also seemed to have a high rate of reproduction - two sheets left alone would shortly become a small pile.

I've started looking critically at other people's offices, and their desks in particular. A room containing little paper and a clean desk is very suspicious. Of course, it may mean that the person has just started the job, or is about to leave, or that they actually have two offices (the paper mountain is in the other one). If none of these scenarios apply then the individual has working habits completely different from the rest of the human race.

Andrew Davison