I was assigned to medical filing in my nonmilitary service and being a programmer kid I immediately saw it through the algorithmic lens: sort your incoming file

I was assigned to medical filing in my nonmilitary service and being a programmer kid I immediately saw it through the algorithmic lens: sort your incoming files (the paper kind) before inserting them in the ordered shelves, sort larger stacks by subdividing into smaller stacks then ordering those (a very cheap operation if everything fits between the fingers of one hand!) in preparation for an ordered merge, sort very large stacks by pre-sorting into unordered buckets first and so on. All tuned on the spot to changing physical constraints like desk space. Or room space, that one time when we did a minor index reorganizion involving several tons of paper. Later when I took courses about RDBMS internals etc it felt like this experience helped a lot.