I was in my office the other day, when a colleague asked me a fairly innocuous question:

“Got a pen I can borrow?”

Instinctively, my hand went to where my jacket would have been had I been wearing a jacket; then I glanced across the barren wasteland of my desktop; and then across my neighbours’ similarly arid desktops, before answering:

“No.”

The simple fact was that I didn’t have a pen, nor did I know where one could be easily found.  In my office, no one uses them anymore.

When I first joined the office, it was a different story.  Ask the same question back then and the answer would have been:

“Sure.  What colour?”

At that time, my office had an entire room dedicated to stationery; it employed a fulltime Stationery Manager – Len – to facilitate its procurement and distribution.

Need a pen?  No problem, Len will be able to supply you with one.

It was the same with every other item of stationery.  Ream of foolscap.  Box of staples.  Ten rubber bands.  Bulldog clips.  Window envelopes, DL Manila.  There was nothing that Len could not supply from his stationery cupboard of plenty.

As PCs began to replace typewriters, Len was required to move with the times.  His cupboard became stocked with more replacement toner cartridges and fewer typewriter daisy wheels.

But Time was not on Len’s side.  A greater reliance on digital technology; a trend for outsourcing; home working.  They had all taken their toll.  By the time of his retirement, the stationery empire that he had once presided over had shrunk to a pale carbon copy of its former self.

Nowadays, the stationery cupboard is no more and I, for one, miss it.  It had once been a British comedy institution.  No budding office romance could take place without a tryst in the stationery cupboard.  Carry On in the workplace.  Dobby giving Mark a hand with his USB stick.

I miss the stationery cupboard, even when the most exciting encounter I ever experienced there was finding a sharp HB.

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree pushes the envelope.