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Bartleby: The archaeology of the office
巴托比：辦公室的考古學
A walk around the workplace is also a trip back in time
在工作場所散步也是一次時光旅行
The office is where colleagues meet, work and bond.
辦公室是同事見面、工作和聯系的地方。
But it is also a time capsule, a place where the imprint of historic patterns of working are visible everywhere.
但它也是一個時間膠囊，在辦公室里，過往工作模式的印記隨處可見。
The pandemic has heightened this sense of the office as a dig site for corporate archaeologists.
疫情暴發后，辦公室可供企業考古學家挖掘的感覺更加濃厚。
It isn’t just that covid-19 has left its own trace in the fossil record, from hand sanitisers to social-distancing stickers.
這不僅僅是因為新冠肺炎在企業化石記錄中留下了自己的痕跡，比如洗手液以及保持社交距離的警示貼紙等。
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.
還有一個原因是，疫情前有用的東西現在變得沒那么有用了；疫情前看起來就已經過時的東西，現在看來也確實過時了。
The most obvious artefact is the landline phone, a reminder of the days when mobility meant being able to stand up and keep talking.
最明顯的“手工藝品”就是座機，它讓人想起以前那時候，移動的意思就是可以站著說話。
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.
人們私下已經拋棄了座機--美國疾病控制與預防中心的數據顯示，2021年下半年，25-34歲的美國人中只有不到15%的人家里還有座機--這么長時間過去了，座機卻仍然在辦公室里屹立不倒。
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.
從理論角度來看，座機能存活至今可能是有充分理由的：座機的連接比手機更安全穩定，人們也不必擔心座機電量會耗盡。
In practice the habit of using them was definitively lost during the pandemic.
而實際上，在疫情期間，用座機這種習慣完全消失了。
Now they sit on desk after desk, rows of buttons unpressed, ringtones unheard, cords tellingly unknotted.
現在，座機安坐在一張又一張桌子上，一排排按鈕無人問津，一聲不響，電線也明顯一絲不亂。
Landlines were already well on their way out before covid-19 struck.
在新冠肺炎來襲之前，座機就已經很過時了。
Flipboard charts have suffered a swifter reverse.
在翻轉板上畫圖表這種方式落伍得更快。
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.
其應用場景就是一種特殊的酷刑--人們擠在一個房間里，看著一個白癡用記號筆畫出一個象限，再意味深長地指向右上角。
The idiot is still making quadrants but is now much more likely to use a slide deck.
那個白癡還是在制作象限，但現在用的工具更有可能是幻燈片。
The crowd is still being tortured but is now much more likely to be watching on a screen.
那群人仍然在遭受折磨，但他們現在看的地方更有可能是塊屏幕。
The office still has flipboards, but they are stowed in corners and their topmost pages are slowly yellowing.
辦公室里還是有翻轉板的，只不過都被收在角落里，頂層的紙張正在慢慢泛黃。
譯文由可可原創，僅供學習交流使用，未經許可請勿轉載。
