Files

My name is Tom Knight and I am a filer.

On the first day of my summer internship in New York City they asked me, "Could you file these documents please?".

"Sure," I said. Who was I to turn a task down on my first day? And after all, how bad could it be? I would just be putting papers in little files. In my country we call that easy as pie.

Immediately, it was a bit harder than I had anticipated. The filing cabinets, unfortunately, had been dropped recently when they were moved down the hall. So now, opening them required Herculean Strength, and the coordination of Jesus, and if you haven't read the bible, Jesus was very coordinated.

"Basically, what you do," they told me, "you apply some pressure to the left, just sort of nudge in that direction, then you push down and simaultaneously pull out on the drawer. Also, the secret password is 'open sesame'"

To make matters worse, the drawers were built in such a way that once one drawer was open you couldnt open any of the others. I tried really hard to figure out what jerk engineer decided that this was the best way to build a filing cabinets:

In an office supplies factory far-far away:

Jerk Engineer (looks a lot like Timmy): Hmm, I will design this filing cabinet so that only one drawer can be open at a time.
Sensible Boss (looks like me): Could you please explain why.
Jerk Engineer: Could you please stop standing on my foot?
Sensible Boss (looks down, he is accidenatlly standing on the engineers foot): Oh sorry, I didn't mean to (lifts foot).

And so the sensible boss was distracted and embarassed because Timmy's foot was now broken on account of his incredibly fragile skeletal system, and the engineer got away with his diabolical plan.

Basically what this means is that every time I file a paper I have to heave open the impossible drawer, place the paper in the appropriate file, and then, tears freely flowing, undo my work and close the drawer.

Day 2, they eased my pain, by bringing in some fully functioning cabinets, and then brought the pain back by telling me to move all the files from the old cabinets to the new ones. This took about three hours. I made myself feel better by telling myself that what I was doing was actually not that different from what stock brokers do. The old cabinets were people selling their stocks, and the new cabinets were buying them. My imaginary brokerage firm did a really good job, and all of the stocks were being quickly bought up. These are the pathetic self-deulsion of a professional filer.

To be continued...