If you thought there were some things that are so trivial even I wouldn’t bother with them, well, you were wrong. My attention was riveted by this yesterday afternoon:
I read these pages with great enjoyment as I’ve had quite bit of experience with the little tags they used to label equipment. Here’s an example that just happens to be at hand, an ammeter used by Electrical Engineering. It’s been tagged three times, twice on the front and once on the back. I think the metal tag on the front is the one under discussion above:
I know you’ll forgive me for laughing at the last section of the memo, the one about keeping permanent records of the locations of all this equipment. It wound up all the hell over the place.
Bonus: We also now know who actually tagged the stuff!
There’s also a brushed aluminum five-or-six-digit adhesive sticker that was used prior to the mid-80s or so. I could show you one if you really want. We have some on old furniture. What is described in this memo is actually similar, with updates, to what is done every two years now. Generally inventory is only limited to items of $5000 value or more, not every stick of furniture and computer. Thank goodness.
I have the barcode version on my patrol car.
I was responsible for doing both the semi-annual inventory and the annual Acceptable Use Report for my department, at my former august employer, on the other side of Main St.
Fortunately, all of the really early items had long since been purged from the inventory, but I occasionally turned up something that still had one of the ancient tags.
It is a miserable process, made more difficult by poor record-keeping (typos, 40-character data fields for items with 120-character (or longer) descriptions, et al).
I can only imagine the nightmare of tracking all those things (desks?!?) without computers.