Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The clipboard and the pencil are perhaps the simplest yet effective tools for doing something important: recording history. And if we don’t have our history, we will repeat work and waste resources.

I was in high school—a long time ago in a place far, far away. It was the train station (no longer used) in Amite, Louisiana. Our high school was using the building to host a fund raiser.

As I was want to do, I wandered away from the organized activities to seek out something more interesting. I found papers on a dusty shelf from 1941 (sort of a famous year in American history). Someone with a clipboard and a pencil had written on them. This was history.

History is important. It is important to society as we have that saying about being doomed to repeat mistakes or something.

History is important to an organization attempting any endeavor worth attempting. If we don’t know what we did yesterday, we are apt to do it again today and waste lots of resources. How many of us have resources to waste?

I once saw a group of really smart people spend $20million building a database system to record the comings and goings of magnetic tapes from a storeroom. No kidding—these were really smart people. No kidding—they spent $20million of 1990 money. (Is that $30million or $40million today?)

All we needed to do back then was put a person at the door with a clipboard and a pencil. Take a tape out of the storeroom? Your name is recorded along with the tape you took. Bring the tape back? Your name is checked off the list. Don’t bring the tape back? We find you and the tape.

Of course this is a silly and trite example. Such examples of waste, however, often seem silly and trite.

Still, a person with a clipboard and a pencil can do an important and resource-saving task: record history.

Consider the cost and the savings.