There’s the four drawer ones that sat in our box room for six years and became home to enough dust that, frankly, it looked like the interior of a school office had exploded inside and died there. Then there’s the two drawer ones that lives next to our sofa holding takeaway menus and a toddler’s birth certificate and makes the room look like it was literally invited. Same colour, broadly same shape but one of them we’d inevitably have taken photos of for insurance reasons and the other one we’d have documented for posterity. Might make up the whole collection of filing cabinets in this world, really, the argument about whether or not a white filing cabinet is furniture, or just admin given legs.
Half of us think buying white was the mistake from the outset because white shows up everything. Biro marks, coffee rings, scuffs from where someone thought moving it meant dragging it hell and truly across your laminate flooring instead of picking it up like a human. The others want to know why that matters because beige and grey ones just sit there never doing anything whereas you at least know a white one has had lived experiences.
It has strong feelings about ink stains and we respect the filing cabinet for that.
Nobody wants one in a bedroom.
Did anyone ever ask for a filing cabinet in any capacity?
Moral of the story is now one of us has had it living in our bedroom doing duty as a bedside table for three years. Lamp on top. Drawers full of mystery phone chargers we definitely own. It’s worked. Better than worked. It’s given us stable surfaces on which to actually PUT DOWN our glasses instead of toppling them on in gentle defiance every evening.
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I think the main thing is what you do with the drawers. They’re the make or break; whether your filing cabinet earns its keep or whether it’s quietly loathed, filling your wallet with mouldering paperwork as you hurl it across your apartment in nostalgia fueled angst. Cheap runners jam every time you shove too many files in the bottom one you swear you’d sort through ‘tomorrow’ and suddenly you’re the wielder of heavy grey metal yanking it halfway across your carpet like some kind of flipchart reject, two hands coated in whatever filing system you had in 1999. Ours with the sleek metal runners has never subjected us to that moment.
Ours without them has done so repeatedly and was sold off for a profit of twenty quid to another person who hates vacuuming under it as much as we did.
What no-one tells you about buying a white filing cabinet is how cathartically everyone uses it as a surface.
Post gets put on it.
Keys get put on top of it. You forget a plant is sitting on top of it until it silently dies, while everyone thinks someone else is looking after it, for months. It was supposed to make folders disappear but instead it takes up all of your inconveniences and holds them hostage in plain site.
We’ve argued back and forth over office supplies whether that functionality is it’s selling point or what makes it infuriating. Haven’t come close to agreeing. Truth is, probably. Everyone will say, hand on heart, that the second it stops looking like something the fuck in your office and starts blending into your furniture is the second you don’t notice it holding files at all. The magic isn’t the drawers. The illusion is how well it vanishes into your home.
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