每天一篇经济学人 | The archaeology of the off...

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. 

办公室是同事见面、工作和联络感情的地方。但它也是一个时间胶囊，在这里，历史工作模式的印记随处可见。疫情加剧了这种办公室作为企业考古学家挖掘场所的感觉。这不仅是因为新冠病毒在化石记录中留下了自己的痕迹，从洗手液到保持社交距离的贴纸。还有一个原因是，在新冠疫情前有用的物品现在变得不那么有意义了; 那些本来就显得古色古香的东西，现在看来确实是过时了。

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. 

最明显的人工制品是座机，它提醒人们一个移动的时代，在这个时代移动意味着可以站着说话。尽管人们在个人生活中丢弃了固定电话，根据美国疾病控制与预防中心的数据，2021年下半年，25至34岁的美国人中只有不到15%的人家里有固定电话，但固定电话仍然存在于办公室。

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.

这种持续存在可能有很好的理论理由: 它们提供了比手机更安全、更稳定的连接，而且没有人会担心它们的电池快用完了。实际上，使用它们的习惯在大流行期间完全消失了。现在，它们坐落在一张又一张桌子上，一排排的按钮没有按下，听不到铃声，电话线明显没有打结。

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.

在covid-19爆发之前，固定电话已经很过时了。Flipboard图表遭遇了更快的逆转。这些物品标志着一种特殊类型的痛苦折磨，人们挤在一个房间里，一个白痴用记号笔画一个象限，并意味深长地指向右上角。白痴仍然在制作象限，但现在更有可能使用幻灯片。人们仍在遭受折磨，但现在更有可能是在屏幕上观看。办公室里仍然有翻页板，但它们被堆放在角落里，最上面的页面慢慢变黄了。

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. 

如果你的办公室还在使用内部邮件，那些邮件有着特殊的包含人们姓名的信封，当这些信封在组织中“走来走去”的时候，名字会被划掉[这里应该理解不到位，有懂的小伙伴可以在评论区留言]，那么你就处于一场公司历史剧中。但大多数办公室仍然保留着纸张在历史上重要性的线索。复印机、扫描仪、碎纸机、裁切机和大得不可想象的钉书机让人想起不久前的一个时代，那时纸质文件是一种重要的“货币”，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. 

收件篮和待发信件盘是过去信息如何在组织内部流动的明显提醒。布告板和名片曾经是传递消息和联系方式的最佳方式。关于无纸化办公的预测已经出现了几十年; 它们现在还不可能实现。但是文具柜以后就没有那么多存货了。

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. 

如今，办公室工作人员和远程工作人员之间的会议依赖于Zoom或Microsoft Teams等平台。然而，到处寻找，你可能会发现一种在2019年那些昏暗而遥远的日子里被视为有用的东西: 电话会议扬声器。这个扬声器看起来有点像小型航天器，必须插在插座上才能工作。灯光会突然闪烁，人们会敬畏地喃喃自语。有人会拨号，每按一个按钮，就会发出很响的哔哔声。他们不可避免地会在某个时刻碰到错误的地方，不得不重新开始。现在，这些仪式很少进行; 由于科技进步和远程办公的突然兴起，扬声器在货架上积满了灰尘。

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. 

许多办公室的布局都回到了大流行之前的时代。如果你工作的地方到处都是千篇一样的小隔间，仍然有自己的铭牌，或者坐在一张被消化系统一样的电缆拴在地板上的办公桌前，那么当所有员工每天都来办公室时，即使他们只是默默地开始自己的工作，你所处的环境也是有意义的。既然办公室的相对优势在于它是一个与他人合作的地方，社交、沙发和轮用办公桌被视为未来的趋势。

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.

真正的考古学家需要工具和时间来完成他们艰苦的工作: 画笔、泥铲、筛子和镐。企业考古更容易: 你只需要眼睛和对事物过去的记忆。但你也要动作快。随着越来越多的工作场所为适应混合办公时代而进行翻修，现在是时候仔细审视一下办公室周围了。你可能很快就会看到像气动管、打字机和传真机一样过时的东西。