The cashier, a sweet young thing of 20 or so, met my request as though it had been uttered in Klingon. “Carbon ... what?” she stammered, agape. I fled — as fast as my decrepitude would allow.

But the incident set me thinking: The passing of carbon paper (and, more worrisome, the passing of people to whom the words “carbon paper” are as familiar as air) captures in miniature the sea change sweeping today’s work force. With the retirement of each member of the carbon-paper cohort — my cohort — a certain body of collective knowledge, which for decades has lent the American work product an essential, indefinable, generational something, is eroded a little more.