Recently I was shopping for office furniture online along with other machines. I was surprised to learn that an in-office binding system I was looking at would actually be arriving to me by way of Hong Kong. This in itself would not trouble me as I realize we now live in a global marketplace. But because the item I was looking at is designed to bind books and business reports it was important that I have a model built to accommodate standard UK letter sizes. These differ from those used in other countries such as the United States.
A little more examination showed me that many other items I took for granted to be designed for UK usage are not. One of these common office furniture pieces is filing cabinets. Filing cabinets for use in the United Kingdom are designed to accommodate A4 and A3 paper sizes. If I were to purchase a metal filing cabinet on the Internet from a shop not located in the UK, there’s a great chance I would receive a cabinet that my paperwork would not fit into.