Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Today’s copy machines make and store digital copies that go somewhere to someone. Carbon paper still makes a copy for safekeeping that goes to only those I designate.

Copiers—”xerox machines” we used to call them—are now digital. When you make a copy, a there is a digital record of the original somewhere. Hence, when I write or draw something with pencil and paper and make a copy for safekeeping, there is a digital copy somewhere that someone can access, and I may not want someone to access it.

How do I make a copy for safekeeping without producing a digital record anywhere?

Carbon paper.

Oh, that is old, several hundred years old. Put a piece of carbon paper between two sheets of paper, write on the top sheet, and the pressure pushes the carbon onto the bottom sheet. Write once and make copy for safekeeping.

During the 1980s (yes, I am that old), we used Engineering or Laboratory Notebooks that made a “carbon copy” that could be removed from the notebook and filed in a manila folder somewhere.

I want a copy of my own. I don’t want to the world to hold a digital copy. Carbon paper. Still exists.

And those carbon copy lab notebooks still exist. Get ’em while you can.