Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for May 15, 2023

The nursing school equipment supply room had horizontal filing drawers to store their life-size simulation mannequins. They also had a drawer full of assorted body parts for assembling depending on whether the procedure was specific to a male or female.

Ah, the smell of the blue print machines!

I had never really encountered blueprints until my first full time job. I had taken an engineering drafting course in high school, but we never needed to make copies (thank goodness, or thank badness, maybe). I was fascinated by the process, but glad I was not actually involved in making them.

Dare I tell them that this was the Beta for Cloud Storage?

Obviously (to me anyway), that those aren’t deep enough for intact human remains. Look like old 8 1/2 inch floppy disk drive storage cabinets to me. We had them way back in the day.

We still use them. Indispensable!

And suddenly I am recalling the hand cranked blue mimeograph machine in the school office, and peeling sheets of paper off the drum.

3 drawer file cabinet in my workroom contains wood files in top drawer, metal files in the middles and plastics/soft materials files in the bottom.

Okay, so who’s the cartographer?

It also resembles the drawers used to store taxidermy specimens. I used to work part-time in the Zoology Museum of the University I attended. Most of the drawers were full of specimens “stuffed” by students. Hundred of drawers of mus musculus (house mouse). You never forget that smell.

Now I suppose they practice taxidermy in virtual reality (not really).

I loved working in old filing cabinets, getting into old and new files, and map drawers! It could be like holding history in one’s hands, especially with Government documents that went back to the 1920’s or 1930’s (and on rare occasion, even earlier). When I was much younger, my parents had several of the old olive drab filing cabinets, still full of their school papers from the 1930’s and 1940’s, which was like 30 or 40 year earlier. I thought it was really cool (and I loved those cabinets)!