Death to Arch-lever Files

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By Grey | October 21, 2008

Arch-lever files are an abortional blight upon the world of office supplies. For those of you who have never organized files in England, you know not the horror of these devices.

For some ungodly reason, this malevolent device usurped the divine manilla folder in Great Britain. Why the English love their arch-lever files, I do not know. The problems with them are endless.

Practicality

Papers that go inside arch-lever files must be either hole punched or put inside plastic protector sheets. If hole punched, it’s only a matter of time before the sheet rips. This is unacceptable for original documents and a needless annoyance for others. These ripped sheets slowly accumulate, forming a precarious mass that lies in wait to spill out in catastrophe. The plastic protectors are no better. They merely take longer to rip and add an additional step to the already cumbersome burden of filing, which brings us to another point:

Arch-lever files are slow. The act of hole-punching impedes efficient filing. First you have to find the hole puncher, then separate your sheets into punchable stacks. Lift, shove, punch, tap, empty, lift, shove, punch, tap. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Trying to insert or remove a single sheet of paper from the back of an overloaded arch-lever file is a Herculean task — three inches of paper on top of the needed sheet is heavier than you think. And don’t try and lift it to quickly or the metal prongs will open and the papers will come undone. I hope you hole punched all 400 sheets perfectly or you’ll have trouble getting them back in.

And what about single pieces of paper that don’t belong in a logical large category? Trying to come up with a complete taxonomy for the arch-lever file is a lexicographical nightmare.

Space

Arch-lever files are an arbitrary, immutable size. The most common ones for business are three inches across. This encourages massive overloading — rather than have a file drawer for ‘client data’ with one folder per client, the English cram all client documents into a single arch-lever file. The desire to keep disparate papers together overrides the sensible limits of the physical world.

The finite size of each binder leaves no room whatsoever for expanding categories or changing your filing system. What if one middle section outgrows the binder, but the other sections are still small? ‘Screw you,’ says the arch-lever file. Filing systems need to be flexible, adaptable, yet the arch-lever files are willfully anti-evolutionary, managing to be simultaneously ambiguous and inflexible.

Arch-lever files eat shelf space. All the arches and levers and encasing cardboard take up vast amounts of space, and the shelving required to house this grotesque bulk is obscene. If you ever move offices the slothful arch-lever files must be handled individually where as a filing cabinet full of manilla folders just loads onto a dolly.

Aesthetics

The two holes of the English binders in general and arch-lever files in particular are antithetical to three point precision. They are too close together to actually hold the paper in place, so the sheets wobble back and forth, fidgeting their way toward freedom. As a teacher I manage classes which are, god help me, mandated to use two-hole binders. On the occasion an American student manages to smuggle a three hole binder across the pond, her binder is always much neater, because it actually binds the paper in its place.

How the Empire upon which the sun never sat did all their paper work is beyond me. Any American expats out there know where it’s possible to get decent office supplies in England?

A pox upon the arch-lever file!

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This was a collaborative post with my wife, Noelani Grey, who knows the horrors of office work in England far better than I.

Header photograph by aWee

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