What did we do at work before there was an Internet? This is a question that I’ve asked myself fairly often. What’s funny is that, during my first office job during college, I actually did work in a pre-Internet office. I worked there for two summers; in the first they had no Internet, and in the second they’d just gotten their LAN line installed. But remembering back to that time in the mid-nineties really seems like ages ago…
So working in a setting where I don’t have access to the Internet, because we’re on a closed network, is a reminder of how it used to work. Though I still wonder how people functioned in office jobs without computers–when things got slow, did you read books? The newspaper? Do crosswords?
Anyway, on a closed network, there’s plenty of files to snoop around in, and stuff to look through. My coworker tweaks VBA coding on our software tool (I keep nagging him to back it up so that he doesn’t render it inoperable before we need it) and I read through old files, old briefings, and use the Paint program to color in maps of Korea as underlays for some of the charts we may be producing. Actually, that paid off today–one of the people who’d seen me working on it asked me to print the map out so that she’d have a visual reference when she was briefing her team about some stuff! So I felt like my time hadn’t been wasted, after all.
Several of my favorite authors had desk-job careers before they eventually wrote their signature series, and each of them talked about how they’d spent lots of time writing stuff down when things were slow at work. I think that, without the Internet where I could spend time rabbit-trailing down obscure lines of research, I probably would have done something similar–spent my days developing extensive notes for an eventual fantasy epic or something of the sort that I intended to write. I might even have done the actual writing there… though the office environment isn’t the most conducive to the kind of focused creative effort that goes into really writing a story when the words are flowing…
Posted by Kjirstin 
