Am I the only one who has unread emails going back to forever? I say, “Oh, I’ll deal with that soon,” and then, you know, two iPhone OS’s later… Actually, I don’tknow how long it has been since the last OS, but that seems to be how people measure time these days. Just trying to stay hip, kiddies!

But what I was going to say is that I was finally going through old emails, and there were a bunch from some nice folks who read a piece I wrote about Rolodexes for Gizmodo some months ago. It then got picked up on MSNBC a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, MSNBCers are big into correspondence. How old school! Lots of good stories about Rolodexes in my inbox now. I’ll try to share some of them here soon.

One woman, Laurie Chapple of Louisiana Office Supply Co in Baton Rouge, LA, wrote:

One by one, we have been seeing items going obsolete in the office products industry.  However, the elderly still call and ask for discontinued/dying items such as:

List finders – like a rolodex, but in a flat “dial” a letter format.

Kor rec type – pre-correcting sellectric typewriter - when I worked summers in the 70’s, we shipped them out by the case load. 

Carbon Paper – Still has good uses when you are away from a computer 

Dr Scat – originally made for cleaning typewriter platens (the rolling pen part), but great for getting adhesive off glass.

 I’d heard of all of these but the last one. After some super intensive research (I had to go through at least three pages of Google results) I found this photo by

 shanksie on Flickr:

The left bottle is noted: “Scat-o-phone: Keep your telephone fresh clean and healthful. Wipe a few drops on the mouthpiece. Your phone is sanitary and deodorized.” 

Smells like a combination of rubbing alcohol and perfume.

The right: “Cleaner for typewriter, rubber platen roll and type.”