how to keep your ducks in a row

     Consider the alphabet. Its 26 characters are always arrayed in precisely the same order. Which is very useful for organizing information, even when a computer is handy. When a list of items is arranged in alphabetical order, any number of things can be easy to search through--you can find whatever you're looking for in matter of seconds, assuming you know what it was called, or under what name or title it was filed.  A list of thousands, or even millions of names, can be checked for one particular name--in seconds--perhaps even if you're not sure of the spelling. Everything beginning with the letter "A" comes first. Next we look at the second letter--"A" comes before "B", and so on through the alphabet, according to the number of letters in each word. People managed to keep track of files by the hundreds of thousands in this way, long before computers were invented, and alphabetization is still useful to people who need to look through a list, as opposed to entering a name in a search box.