Word: desk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...mathematics class was over, and the haggard, pale instructor gathered up his papers. One of the boys approached him and asked for the foreign stamp on a letter that lay on the desk. As the teacher started to oblige, the boy had an afterthought: "Please, would you give me the whole envelope with your name on it? It will be worth lots of money some day." Even in children's minds, Henri Dubois, 37, mathematics teacher at the Technical College for Boys in the French city of Albi, is a famous man. All through the French Pyrenees his name...
...Cooking surfaces fold back into the wall when not in use, hard-to-reach shelves glide down to shoulder level at the touch of a hand, refrigerators automatically serve cold water, ice cubes or crushed ice. On one side of the kitchen there is a "home-planner's desk" with a TV set that can be tuned so the housewife can peer into the living room and nursery or see who is at the front door...
...instructor sitting at his control console decides where the mission shall start. By setting the apparatus, he can fly the desk-bound students anywhere he pleases in the northern hemisphere. As the simulated bomber heads for Alaska. Petropavlovsk or Greenland, the chicken-wire dome with its pinpoint stars wheels and tilts slowly just as the real stars would seem to do from the observation window of a real bomber...
...climbs the spiral stair that leads to the platform inside the dome. He glances up at the simulated stars and selects the ones he thinks will guide him best. He observes their position with a sextant, just as he would on a real airplane, and hurries back to his desk to figure out his position over the Canadian tundra or the frozen Polar...
Rigid rules are often laid down to try to avoid such problems. Standard Oil of California, for example, classifies every employee from Type One (draperies, wall-to-wall carpeting, walnut desk, etc.) down to Type Four (no private office, oak desk). A big Manhattan company has set up a chart for every contingency in preparation for moving into a new building now under construction. A top-echelon man gets 280 sq. ft., "furnished to taste," with or without private washroom, depending on whether he is a director. Lesser lights will get 210 sq. ft., again furnished to taste...