New Year’s resolutions spark a myriad of promises. While losing weight, paying off debt, or getting a better job usually top the list, getting organized or clearing clutter will fall to the bottom. At home, clearing clutter means cleaning the garage; in the office, it means organizing your personal contacts. For some, this means updating the Rolodex.
Arnold Neustadter, who graduated from Erasmus Hall High School and New York University, invented a number of products using the ‘-dex’ suffix such as the Swivodex (a spill-free inkwell), Punchodex (hole punch), and Clipodex (reading tool for dictation). But it was the spring-mounted Autodex phone directory that sat near telephones around the globe. My wife has used the same Autodex to catalog all of her friends & family since we met in 1998, but unlike the millions of other Rolodex users, I’ve never taken advantage of the spinning card catalogs even though they are one of the most secure and reliable means for housing contact information.
Autodex Directory Popped Open
Classic Rolodex
Flat Rolodex
The Rolodex filing cabinet on wheels (what we know as the Classic Rolodex) helped Neustadter’s Zephyr American Corporation take off thanks to Neustadter working with engineer Hildaur L. Neilsen, who made dramatic improvements to the Wheelodex card catalog. Little has changed since its invention, and today Rolodex is part of the Newell Rubbermaid family of products: Sharpie, Rubbermaid storage, Goody hair products, and the like. Formally, the Rolodex unified the clutter of business cards and scraps of paper into a singular, flexible, and expandable system that can save time and energy. And with a little imagination, it became something more! Making a Rolodex flip-book animation, made you all the envy at parties. And who remembers visiting the small public library with a Rolodex card catalog, that classified listings with the Dewey Decimal System?
Sure, it wasn’t always used as a "high tech" address book, but that’s what made it popular. From a business and strategic standpoint, the owner’s Rolodex came to stand for power: "It’s not who you are, but who you know." To many executives, the Rolodex meant more than their job. A New York Times article about the HBO series Entourage provided one anecdote about Gavin Polone, a former agent, who clung to his Rolodex with dear life for fear of losing his contacts upon losing his job. At one time my wife had Leonardo DiCaprio’s cell phone number listed in her Autodex, and sure enough, when I called it in 1999, I got Leo’s voicemail (I never asked her—and she never told me—how she got the number).
Some Rolodex users like my wife, treat their catalogs with utter care by writing neatly on each card’s face with pen; although I knew an accountant in Seattle, and she swore by pencil so she could update the contact cards when people moved from place to place, or job to job. When I asked why she never migrated to a Palm Pilot, she said, "I never had the time." Those that have the time are the spick-and-span Roloretentive card filers, who create templates in Microsoft Word: the cards all have matching typography in a unified layout, giving the appearance that Edward Tufte himself constructed the listings. For as many Rolodex users that design their catalogs neatly from A-Z, there are just as many who treat them like a junk drawer. (It’s the messy ones that I enjoy most because owning a tool that creates order, but having it look like a convoluted mess of paper tickles me.) I adore catalogs with business cards taped to the Rolodex cards and Post-It notes splintering outside the cylinder, where multiple colors and sizes dance in an accordion fashion from the front to back. I’ve aptly coined these the Skittledex—a rainbow of paper.
Skittledex: as Represented by Comstock
It’s hard to gauge what kind of Rolodex user I could have been if I adopted one, but I came into contact management through spreadsheets on the Mac Plus. (As a young tech geek, I cataloged all of my comic books in a massive spreadsheet, not a Rolodex card catalog like my friends.) And earning a free Rolodex at work didn’t help convince me. My first desk job in 1992 provided me with a computer, telephone, IBM Selectric, MicroFiche reader, and Rolodex. As excited as I should have been about having a Rolodex, I never took the time to transfer items from my database into its card system—it seemed like backwards technology compared with an Excel spreadsheet. Although I adopted spreadsheets and e-mail as early 1992, I didn’t use a Palm Pilot until 2001 when many of my peers had already adopted smart phones. Devices like the Palm Pilot, BlackBerry and iPhone seem poised to kill the Rolodex within the next five to ten years.
Despite the technical wizardry that companies like Apple, Palm, and BlackBerry offer us, Rolodex continues to takes pride in being what they deem the "organizational authority when it comes to innovative, easy-to-use products for the home, office and in transit." Really. Plenty of iPhone and BlackBerry junkies would consider Rolodex archaic, and few of my teenage to twenty-year-old students recognize them during my design history lectures. Rolodexes may be "old fashioned" or "old school" to some, but don’t give up on them yet.
Rolodex Business Card Holder, Handy for Travel in Foreign Lands
I had a graduate school mentor who used a Rolodex business card holder with its sticky vinyl sleeves to catalog all of his contact information (he had them all in a Palm Pilot too, talk about methodical). I have seen this system put to use during a visit to Beijing China, when our mentor pulled cards (with English and Chinese) from his file and gave the destination’s business card to the taxi driver, who read from the card’s address and drove us where we needed. Anytime we arrived someplace new, he would take a business card at the cashier or reception desk, and file it for future use.
Chalk one point to Rolodex. (Besides this winning example, I see few reasons to maintain a Rolodex system and fewer reasons for Rolodex to continue to stay in business with their existing product line.) Still, they stay in business. Maybe it’s because Rolodexes are free of crashes after upgrading to Leopard. Perhaps they survive thanks to business card holders, and users who travel to foreign lands. Or maybe it’s because of the nifty desk accessories they now sell—I may buy the handy cord organizers to declutter behind my desk. But the company as a whole seems poised for extinction, posing the question, When will we see the last Rolodex sold? Soon. How soon is anyone’s guess, as the cell phone is looking more and more like today’s Rolodex. New content management tools will bridge information from our phone to our personal computer to our calendar to our e-mail, putting our contacts everywhere (sometimes for everybody else to use).
One of Many Rolodex Graveyards
This Orwellian issue of everybody else comes into play when the the likes of LinkedIN, Facebook, or MySpace have users import contacts from Gmail, Yahoo!, or Hotmail. (For a frightening look at scraping, read the Jan. 2008 Wired.) Having contacts bartered or sold from one source to another seems like just cause to dig up your Rolodex and lock down your valuable contact lists behind your office door. You can rank that What If the Good Old Days Were Here to Stay a close second to teenagers tethering landline phones from the kitchen into their bedroom with 20-foot cords to have "private" conversations behind closed doors. Neither will happen anytime soom because nobody wants to turn back the clock. People love their gadgets. Holding a cell phone, BlackBerry, or iPhone in the aesthetic plane of your hand is more pleasing (and more portable) than flipping fingers through a card catalog. Why doesn’t Rolodex realize this?
As computer technology becomes more pervasive, we may see less and less of the Rolodex card catalog, but as privacy and security issues arise Rolodex could create paperless, pervasive, secure, and private contact management systems to compete in today’s technologically-ridden market. Until that happens, I will need to find a new Autodex for my wife, since the current one broke. Problem is, not only do the Amazon.com reviews make the product sound like a counterfeit, but they’re also in short supply. With the Autodex becoming an endangered species, I feel like we’re nearing the Rolodex twilight.
I have actually been thinking of switching to a classic rolodex because I like to have the actual business cards archived in a physical form. I went into Office Depot looking for a standard wheel rolodex that was wide enough to accommodate taping in business cards and the sales representative looked at me like I ha two heads and then she told me about the many benefits of having a crackberry. Upon further research, I stumbled upon this rolodex from pottery barn:
http://www.potterybarn.com/products--p8067--index.shtml
I might get that.
On Jan.04.2008 at 10:57 AM