Padlocks

Padlocks

Series: Old Junk

12-12-2025 · Background

Gone were the days of pounding away on typewriters. Even their electric successors with the ability to correct the occasional typo – a huge step forward from manually whiting them out with Tipp-Ex – were already gathering dust. It was the nineties, and computers were making their grand entrance at the Observant office.

Back then, your monitor was a boxy thing with a bulge at the back, your hard drive lived in a separate unit, and you had to use floppy disks to physically hand your texts over to colleagues. Email wasn’t a thing yet, and none of us had ever heard of Wi-Fi.

These expensive gadgets took up half your desk. To make sure they stayed put (small devices had gone missing from the office before), they were chained down with steel cables and small padlocks. The locks were tiny; a decent screwdriver could probably have defeated them. But they did the job until, years later, the clunky old machines were replaced by newer, much faster models. Why these weren’t chained to the desks, we don’t know. But the padlocks ended up in a plastic box in a filing cabinet, waiting for the day someone can put them to good use. If you have any valuables you’d like to lock away, please don’t hesitate to drop us an email.

Lost and found

Every week, Observant dusts off an object that’s been lying around the office for years, if not decades. If you’d like to give one a new home, feel free to drop by or send us an email at [email protected]

Author: Riki Janssen

Photo: Observant

Tags: instagram,padlocks,computer,thief,chain,gadgets

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