2022年经济学人 办公室的考古学（1）

（单词翻译）

Business

商业版块

Bartleby: The archaeology¹ of the office

巴托比：办公室的考古学

A walk around the workplace is also a trip back in time

在工作场所散步也是一次时光旅行

The office is where colleagues meet, work and bond.

办公室是同事见面、工作和联系的地方。

But it is also a time capsule, a place where the imprint² of historic patterns of working are visible everywhere.

但它也是一个时间胶囊，在办公室里，过往工作模式的印记随处可见。

The pandemic has heightened this sense of the office as a dig site for corporate³ archaeologists.

疫情暴发后，办公室可供企业考古学家挖掘的感觉更加浓厚。

It isn’t just that covid-19 has left its own trace in the fossil record, from hand sanitisers to social-distancing stickers.

这不仅仅是因为新冠肺炎在企业化石记录中留下了自己的痕迹，比如洗手液以及保持社交距离的警示贴纸等。

It is also that items which were useful in the pre-covid world make less sense now; and that things which were already looking quaint⁴ seem positively⁵ antiquated⁶.

还有一个原因是，疫情前有用的东西现在变得没那么有用了；疫情前看起来就已经过时的东西，现在看来也确实过时了。

The most obvious artefact is the landline phone, a reminder⁷ of the days when mobility⁸ meant being able to stand up and keep talking.

最明显的“手工艺品”就是座机，它让人想起以前那时候，移动的意思就是可以站着说话。

Long after people have junked them in their personal lives—less than 15% of Americans aged⁹ 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.

人们私下已经抛弃了座机--美国疾病控制与预防中心的数据显示，2021年下半年，25-34岁的美国人中只有不到15%的人家里还有座机--这么长时间过去了，座机却仍然在办公室里屹立不倒。

There might be good theoretical reasons for this persistence¹⁰: they offer a more secure and stable connection than mobile phones, and no one frets¹¹ that they are about to run out of battery.

从理论角度来看，座机能存活至今可能是有充分理由的：座机的连接比手机更安全稳定，人们也不必担心座机电量会耗尽。

In practice the habit of using them was definitively¹² lost during the pandemic.

而实际上，在疫情期间，用座机这种习惯完全消失了。

Now they sit on desk after desk, rows of buttons unpressed, ringtones unheard, cords tellingly unknotted.

现在，座机安坐在一张又一张桌子上，一排排按钮无人问津，一声不响，电线也明显一丝不乱。

Landlines were already well on their way out before covid-19 struck.

在新冠肺炎来袭之前，座机就已经很过时了。

Flipboard charts have suffered a swifter reverse.

在翻转板上画图表这种方式落伍得更快。

These objects signal a particular type of torture—people physically¹³ crowded together into a room while an idiot sketches¹⁴ a quadrant with a marker pen and points meaningfully to the top-right-hand corner.

其应用场景就是一种特殊的酷刑--人们挤在一个房间里，看着一个白痴用记号笔画出一个象限，再意味深长地指向右上角。

The idiot is still making quadrants but is now much more likely to use a slide deck.

那个白痴还是在制作象限，但现在用的工具更有可能是幻灯片。

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，但他们现在看的地方更有可能是块屏幕。

The office still has flipboards, but they are stowed in corners and their topmost pages are slowly yellowing.

办公室里还是有翻转板的，只不过都被收在角落里，顶层的纸张正在慢慢泛黄。