This reminded me of an incident here in Los Angeles a few decades ago, in the late 70's. The city's central financial and banking district was along an area of a few blocks on Spring Street in downtown. All the bank headquarters and stock brokerages, including the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange, had buildings and offices all along the street. The buildings were rather old and had windows that opened, unlike today's modern buildings. It was the custom, on the last business day of the year, to throw out the current year's desk and wall calendar pages, along with other assorted paper, from the windows at noon as a sort of "end of the year" celebration. One year, a very large and prominent brokerage had transferred all its contact information from index and rolodex cards to an in-house master computer system. On the last day of the year, some employees decided to include these "waste" items in the paper blizzard they were going to toss out the windows and off the roof. Unfortunately, they forgot the cards still had the contact and account information for the clients. Brokers from competeing houses found the cards on the sidewalk and started to scoop them up hoping to get business lead information. The word got back to the house that has dumped the cards and the management immediately ordered all available employees to get out on the sidewalk and try to recover as many of the cards and data as possible. I still recall the sight of the large group of Brooks Brothers suited brokers, on hands and knees on the sidewalk, desperately sifting through all the paper, feverishly trying to keep their jobs...
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