A walk around the workplace is also a trip back in time. The office is where colleagues meet, work and bond. But it is also a time capsule, a place where the traces of historic patterns of working are visible everywhere. The pandemic has heightened this sense of office as a dig site for corporate archaeologists.
The most obvious object is the landline phone(固定电话), 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- landline phones survive in offices.
There might be good reasons for its persistence: they offer a more secure and stable connection than mobile phones, and no one worries that they are about to run out of battery. In practice, the habit of using them was definitely lost during the pandemic. Now they sit on desk after desk, rows of buttons unpressed, ring tones unheard.
Landline phones were already well on their way out before covid-19 struck. Whiteboard charts have suffered a swifter reverse. These objects signal a particular type of pain- people physically crowded together into a room while a manager sketches a graph with a marker pen and points meaningfully to the top-right-hand corner, giving requirements never to be satisfied. This manager is still making graphs but is now much more likely to use a PowerPoint. The crowd is still being tortured but is now much more likely to be watching on the screen. The office still has whiteboards, but they are left in corners and the charts on them are slowly yellowing.
Real archaeologists need tools and time to do their painstaking work: brushes, shovels 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 work places are revamped for the post-pandemic era. Now its time to take a careful look around the office: you may see something that will soon seem outdated.
