When I cleared out my home office after I retired at the end of June, several treasures I found stashed away reminded me of the wide-reaching impact of technology on our workplaces. In today’s Clutter Tale, I share the story of three items that reminded me of how we found jobs, networked, and collaborated in the days before the Internet.

About Clutter Tales

Clutter Tales is a series where we tell the stories of our lives through our clutter. During my decluttering journey, I found a lot of things that took me back to a different place and time. Instead of casually discarding them, I decided to honour them by telling their story. I’ve written Clutter Tales about a high school shorthand textbook, an old airline ticket, a travel diary from my trip to France at age 18, notes from a visit to a fortune teller, and more!

Along with my own reflections, this series has featured posts by some of my favourite bloggers. If you’d like to write a guest post for Clutter Tales, please get in touch. I’d love to give you the opportunity to properly thank your clutter by sharing its story too!

Now, on to today’s clutter tale…

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Home office treasures bring back fond memories

In earlier Clutter Tales, I’ve shared memories of things that technology has replaced or changed over the years. The very first Clutter Tale was about a book that taught us how to use the internet. I followed that up with posts about my high school typing and shorthand classes, old film negatives, and TV Guide magazine.

Over the last 40 years, there are very few areas of our lives that technology has not touched, but the greatest impact has been in our workplaces. As I decluttered my home office after retiring at the end of June, I set aside three items that illustrate just how much technology has changed how we find jobs, how we network and communicate, and how we store and share information.

Let’s take a look…

Finding a job

The first thing I found was an old folder of printed resumes, cover letters, and reference letters.

This took me back to the days before LinkedIn, Indeed, or Monster. Back then, finding a job usually started with word of mouth, or the newspaper want ads. If we saw or heard of a job we wanted, we’d type up a cover letter and send it by snail mail with a resume. Then we’d wait.

If we were lucky enough to get called in for an interview, we’d show up with a copy of our resume, and printed copies of our references.

It sounds slow, but it took less time than today’s long drawn-out hiring process in most companies.

Networking

The next thing I found was a box of my business cards, and a pile of business cards that I had collected from people I met at meetings and conferences over the years.

When my first box of business cards landed on my desk back in the 90s, I felt so important! The novelty soon wore off. I can’t begin to count the number of boxes of business cards I’ve thrown away throughout my career thanks to changes in job title, work location, or corporate brand.

But, back in the day, the only way to connect with business associates was to get their card and follow up with a phone call or letter.

LinkedIn has made it so much easier to stay in touch and share information.

Saving and sharing information

By far, the find that brought back the most memories was a diskette labelled “Resumes.” Younger readers may never have seen or heard of diskettes—also known as floppy disks. We used them to save and share files in the days before the cloud.

There were a couple of problems with diskettes. First, they were easily lost, stolen or damaged. Even worse, the storage capacity of a diskette was just 1.44 MB—less than a single high-resolution digital photo. It wasn’t unusual to have dozens of diskettes lying around which made finding files challenging.

But in those days, a cloud was a puffy white thing in the sky, and PCs did not have the storage capacity they do today, so diskettes were our only option to save files.

Our first PC had an 80 MB hard drive. That’s megabytes (MB), not gigabytes (GB) or terabytes (TB). To put it in perspective, there are 1,024 megabytes in a gigabyte and 1,024 gigabytes in a terabyte. Most newer smartphones today are at least 64 GB. My 128 GB smartphone has 1,638 times the storage capacity of my first home PC. And my 1TB laptop is the equivalent of 728,177 diskettes.

Even in the days before digital photos and media-rich presentations, an 80 MB hard drive would fill up quickly. I remember constantly getting “storage full” messages and having to delete files or save them to diskette so our PC would still run.

And if we wanted to share or collaborate on a file, we saved it to a diskette and handed it to the person. If that sounds primitive, it was by today’s standards. But compared to the days of typewriters, when collaboration meant giving a paper copy of something we’d carefully typed to someone to proofread, and then retyping the whole thing with their edits, handing someone a diskette was progress!

What will the future bring?

Although it creates a lot of headaches, technology has simplified our lives both inside and outside the workplace. It makes me wonder what workplaces will look like 40 years in the future. Time will tell.

I hope you enjoyed this installment of Clutter Tales. Please get in touch if you’d like to write a guest post for Clutter Tales. I’d love to give you the opportunity to properly thank your clutter by sharing its story too!

How has technology changed your workplace? What treasures would you find in your home office? Tell me your stories below.