Using English at Work：22 Working at My Desk(3)（在线收听）

If your birthday is next week, you may remind your friends that your birthday is fast approaching.

Depending on old you are, this is a good thing or a bad thing!

Next, I open my filing cabinet.

A "filing cabinet," sometimes called a "file cabinet," is a piece of furniture usually made of wood or metal that has large drawers that are used to hold paper files.

Most office desks have a file cabinet, but there are also separate file cabinets that are not part of a desk.

The documents in filing cabinets are usually organized alphabetically, from the letter A to the letter Z, or by date, or by some other way that is logical so that the files are easy to find.

Or, if you're like me, you have no system and your files are impossible to find!

I open the filing cabinet and take out two files and a manila envelope that has the information I need in them.

A "manila envelope" is a large, yellow-colored envelope (notice we can say "envelope" or "envelope") made from thick paper.

In the United States, most envelopes are small and white. We use these to send letters, usually.

But larger envelopes are often manila envelopes that are yellow.

These envelopes are usually the size of a piece of paper and let you send things in one package without folding them.

For the report, the information I need is inside two files and in a manila envelope.

The next thing I do is look around, or search, for a pad of paper.

A "pad of paper" is many pieces of paper that are held together at one end.

After you've finished writing on one page in the pad of paper, you can tear it off and still have the rest of the pad of paper to use.

The pad of paper I'm looking for is one that I used to jot down some ideas yesterday.

"To jot (jot) down" means to write something down quickly.

You might jot down notes while you listen to someone on the phone, or you might jot down a phone number that you see in an advertisement.