Business | Bartleby

商业 | 巴托比

The archaeology of the office

办公室“考古记”

A walk around the workplace is also a trip back in time

在办公室中漫步，带你穿越时间，回到过去。

The office is where colleagues meet, work and bond. But it is also a time capsule, a place where the imprint of historic patterns of working are visible everywhere. The pandemic has heightened this sense of the office as a dig site for corporate archaeologists. It isn’t just that covid-19 has left its own trace in the fossil record, from hand sanitisers to social-distancing stickers. It is also that items which were useful in the pre-covid world make less sense now; and that things which were already looking quaint seem positively antiquated. 

办公室是同事们见面、工作、建立同事情谊的地方。但它也是一个时间胶囊，在办公室里，过往的工作模式留下的痕迹随处可见。新冠疫情让办公室更像是企业考古学家的挖掘现场。一是因为，办公室里出现了许多疫情爆发前没有的东西，包括免洗洗手液、“保持社交距离”标签等等，这些都成为了承载办公室历史的“化石记录”的一部分。除此之外，疫情爆发前有用的东西如今却派不上什么用场，而以往那些“老古董”现在变得更加过时了。

The most obvious artefact is the landline phone, a reminder of the days when mobility meant being able to stand up and keep talking. Long after people have junked them in their personal lives—less than 15% of Americans aged between 25 and 34 had one at home in the second half of 2021, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention—landline phones survive in offices. 

固定电话最为明显。它勾起了人们的过往回忆：当时，人们对“移动”电话的理解仅仅停留在站着也能打电话。美国疾病控制与预防中心的数据显示，在2021年下半年里，只有不到15%的25至34岁美国人家里装有固定电话。尽管人们在日常生活中早已不再使用固定电话，但在办公室里仍然可见它的身影。

There might be good theoretical reasons for this persistence: they offer a more secure and stable connection than mobile phones, and no one frets that they are about to run out of battery. In practice the habit of using them was definitively lost during the pandemic. Now they sit on desk after desk, rows of buttons unpressed, ringtones unheard, cords tellingly unknotted.

固定电话仍在使用的背后有理可依：相较手机，固话通话更安全、连接更稳定，人们也不用担心电量即将耗尽。但实际在疫情期间，使用固定电话的习惯已然消失。如今，它们被放在一张张桌上，一排排电话按钮也无人按下，电话铃声不再响起，也难见电话线被缠在一起的场景。

Landlines were already well on their way out before covid-19 struck. Flipboard charts have suffered a swifter reverse. These objects signal a particular type of torture—people physically crowded together into a room while an idiot sketches a quadrant with a marker pen and points meaningfully to the top-right-hand corner. The idiot is still making quadrants but is now much more likely to use a slide deck. The crowd is still being tortured but is now much more likely to be watching on a screen. The office still has flipboards, but they are stowed in corners and their topmost pages are slowly yellowing.

固定电话式微早在疫情侵袭前就已是不争的事实，而翻页写字板则不然，疫情彻底改变了它的命运。这些东西是一种办公室折磨的缩影——人们挤在一个房间里，有一个人傻呵呵地画出两个坐标轴，然后再煞有介事的画出一条增长曲线。如今，这个人仍在“作画”，不过现在很可能用幻灯片画；办公室其他人仍在遭受上述折磨，不过以前是在看写字板，现在看的是屏幕；办公室里仍有写字板，不过它们被堆放在角落里，最上面的书页慢慢泛黄了。

If your office still uses internal mail, with those special envelopes that have people’s names crossed out as they wend their way round an organisation, you are in a corporate period drama. But most offices still retain clues to the historical importance of paper. Photocopiers, scanners, shredders, guillotines and unfeasibly large staplers are echoes of a not-too-distant time when physical documents were a vital currency, when people assembled in a single room and shared ideas on pieces of paper.

如果你所在公司还在使用内部邮件——就是那种用特殊的信封封装、在公司内部传阅的邮件，每次发信前，把上一次收件人的名字划掉，换上新的收件人——那么你好似身处于一部公司时代剧中。不过，在大多数办公室仍然可以看到揭示纸张曾经重要地位的线索。复印机、扫描仪、碎纸机、切纸机和大得离谱的钉书机是一个离我们并不遥远的时代的缩影：那时，纸质文件是一种重要的媒介，人们聚在一个房间里，在纸上分享想法。

In-trays and out-trays are visible reminders of how information used to flow within organisations. Noticeboards and business cards were once the best ways to convey news and contact details. Forecasts of the paperless office have been around for decades; they are not about to come true now. But the stationery cupboard will be less well stocked in future.

收文盘和发文盘赫然提醒着人们，以前信息是如何在公司内部流动的。布告板和名片曾是传达消息和传递联系方式的最佳办法。几十年来，一直有人预测，无纸化办公的时代即将来临；只是目前还未到来。但是，公司的文具柜不会再像以前一样装那么多东西了。

Meetings between people in the office and those working remotely rely today on platforms like Zoom or Microsoft Teams. Hunt around, though, and you may find an object that was seen as useful back in those dim and distant days of 2019: the conference-call speakerphone. Looking a bit like a small spacecraft, this phone had to be plugged into a socket to work. Lights would suddenly blink, and people would murmur in awe. Someone would dial in, each button-press a loud beep. They would inevitably hit the wrong one at some point and have to start again. These rituals and others are now rarely performed; the phones themselves are gathering dust on shelves, left behind by better technology and the abrupt rise of remote working. 

今天，在办公室里上班的人员通过Zoom、微软Teams与远程办公的同事开会。虽然2019年的久远记忆似乎已经开始模糊了，但如果在办公室里找找看，也许还能发现当年那个重要的物件：电话会议扬声器。这个有点像宇宙飞船的小玩意要插了电才能工作。会上扬声器的指示灯的突然闪烁，都会让与会人员小声嘀咕，啧啧称奇。不在现场的人会打电话进来加入讨论，每按一次按键都会发出很大的“哔”声。但是总会有人在这个时候按错键，然后又得重来。这类仪式感满满的场景现在已经很难看到了；随着在技术的革新和远程办公的骤然兴起，就连电话机都已经被束之高阁，沦落到积灰的地步了。

注释：

电话会议扬声器：欧美国家开电话会议常用的设备，通常有一到三个指示灯，代表电量、蓝牙、音量、连接状态等等情况。所以本文提到指示灯闪烁，人们会交头接耳，就是指会议突然又了新状况，比如有人加入了、设备连接不上了等等。以下列出了几个扬声器的说明书链接，以供读者参考理解：

lhttps://assets.sennheiser.com/global-downloads/file/9222/SP20_QG_A05_0817_SP15_INT.PDF 

lhttps://www.edis-audio-visual.com/Manuals/SP200%20DATASHEET.pdf

lhttps://www.triumphboard.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/speakerphone-manual-v10-20200827-final-2021.pdf 

The very layout of many offices is a throwback to a pre-pandemic age. If you work in a place filled with identikit cubicles, still have your own nameplate or sit at a desk tethered to the floor by a digestive system’s worth of cabling, you are in an environment that made sense when the whole workforce came to the office every day, even if they just got on with their own work in silence. Now that the office’s comparative advantage is as a place to collaborate with other people, socialising, sofas and hot-desking are seen as the future. 

很多办公室的布局都能让人想起疫情前的日子。如果在一个办公室里，到处都是千篇一律的格子间，每个工位都有不同的名牌，地上密布的线缆错综复杂，绵延不绝，将办公桌牢牢“困住”，那么可以说这是个“过去的”工作环境，那时，所有员工都来坐班，即使只是一言不发地工作。但是现如今，办公室的比较优势是它成为了员工们开展合作的地方，未来它势必会发挥更多的社交功效，引入更多沙发作为陈设，办公桌也会变成先到先得，不再固定工位。

Real archaeologists need tools and time to do their painstaking work: paint brushes, trowels, sieves and picks. Corporate archaeology is easier: you just need eyes and a memory of how things used to be. But you also need to be quick. As more and more workplaces are revamped for the hybrid era, now is the time to take a careful look around the office. You may see something that will soon seem as dated as pneumatic tubes, typewriters and fax machines.

真正的考古学家想要完成艰苦的工作，总是要花大把的时间，也需要趁手的工具：比如刷具、抹子、筛子、镐等等。在企业里考古简单多了：只需要有一双眼睛和对过去的记忆。不过，还要速度快。为了适应当今的混合办公时代，越来越多的工作场所经历了翻新改造。现在是时候仔细看看自己的办公室了，说不定哪个物件就和过去的气动管、打字机、传真机一样，很快就会变成过时的老古董了。

翻译组：

Charlie，本科在读，实事求是

Shulin，女，热咖啡+保温杯，慢慢来er

Xenia，在广度和深度之间摇晃前行，沉迷塔罗和灵性成长的翻译人

校对组：

Vince，语言是前进路上的一道光

Harold，高校搬砖，喜欢打牌的伪文青

Des，愿你半生追逐便士，归来依旧心有月光

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