Office Equipment

A lobby window at Long Beach City Hall was smashed sometime late Friday or early Saturday and office equipment was stolen from two floors, police said. A security guard discovered the shattered first-floor window on Ocean Boulevard and called police about 6 a.m. Saturday, reporting it as vandalism. But a check of the building revealed missing office equipment from the first floor as well as the 14th floor, where a glass door was broken to gain access to a common area.

Drawers flying, the desk dropped from the fifth-floor window and crashed onto the pavement below. Right behind it tumbled a file cabinet, a worktable and a bookcase. It was spring cleaning, Caltrans-style. Workers this week were sweeping out state transportation officials' former regional headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. Chairs, drafting tables, cubical walls and dry-erase message boards were unceremoniously heaved out windows of the Main Street building as passersby gaped in disbelief.

For nearly a decade, Kwei Fong Lin tolerated numbness in her forearms. Like a great many Chinese immigrants who work in this city's cramped and poorly equipped garment factories, her neck and back ached from long days spent hunched over a sewing machine while perched on rickety folding chairs, stools or even crates. "We just took the pain as it came," the 52-year-old Hong Kong native said in Cantonese. But an unlikely revolution has taken root here.

Two Tustin men pleaded guilty Monday to fraud for collecting more than $900,000 from businesses that paid phony bills for copy machine toner, federal authorities said. Mike Mueller and Vern Willhite, both 36, entered guilty pleas in U.S. District Court to one count each of wire fraud and mail fraud. Beginning in 1994, they would call offices claiming to be copier servicemen to get the machines' serial numbers, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Ellyn Lindsay.

Think your office equipment is dated? You're right. Many of the tools of the "modem" office date back decades, even centuries. From the abacus to the Apple, here's a desktop view of five millennia of paper-pushing. 3000 BC: First writing systems appear in the Middle East and China. Babylonians develop the abacus, the ancestor of modern calculators and computers. 1800 BC: Egyptians invent papyrus. Royal scribes are among the first office workers.

An inventive genius and a desktop machine spark a revolution in office technology that sends productivity soaring. In the process, America vaults to the forefront of a leading-edge industry. If you think that sounds a lot like the '70s, you're right. The 1870s, that is. Conventional wisdom has it that the modern office began with the birth of the microcomputer. Fact is, the standard equipment of the Information Age has its roots firmly planted in the industrial era.

With the possible exception of a computer, the most commonly used business tool is the telephone. Yet many small offices--especially home offices--pay little attention to the type of phone they use. Over the years I've purchased a number of inexpensive two- and three-line phones from Panasonic, Sony, AT&T and others, but I'm happiest with the three-line General Electric ProSeries Speakerphone that I recently bought for $99. A two-line version is available for about $49.

When we think of dangerous jobs, we envision police officers, firefighters and folks who climb utility poles. But sitting at a desk can be dangerous too, if you spend a lot of time on the telephone. If you type or do anything else with your hands while you talk on the phone, chances are you're using your neck muscles instead of your hands to hold the phone. That puts strain on your neck, shoulders and back.

I'm one of those people who just cannot ignore a ringing phone. Just maybe, it's a producer from a TV network wanting me to host a prime-time special on small-business computing tools, or a book publisher offering me a million-dollar advance. I may be dreaming, but for many small businesses, missing a call really could mean losing money. One solution is to get call-forwarding so that your office phone automatically calls your cellular phone or whatever phone number you're at.