I work from a home office. Really, I do work from a home office. And that home office is nearly always some unholy sinkhole of cluttered awfulness. There’re stacks on stacks. The stacks have married and bred little stacks. About 10 years ago, the cat took over a large portion of my desk and won’t relinquish it, so at least there aren’t any stacks there.
This morning, being in full-on Monday mode and lacking brain cells for productive work, I thought I’d just tidy up the smaller desk, so my dear husband could have a little place to call his own with his little computer that he calls his own.
One thing led to another – one thing being the realization that I had about two dozen manuals for software that went outdated years ago and the other thing being the realization that I really just needed to sort out this mess – and I was off.
First, I carried out four arm-loads of those outdated software manuals and dumped them into the dumpster. That was the easy part.
Next, I thought I’d sort out the cable-spaghetti that lurks under my main desk. I still had plugs snaking around down there for a computer that went away about the same time that the out-dated software manuals went outdated. I’d replaced the computer, but I’d just left the cords writhing around down in the underside the desk.
And let’s talk about the new pen tablet that was sitting on top of an old pen tablet that had lost its little electronic mind. There they were – stacked one on top of the other, next to my keyboard on the slideout tray. If a working tv sitting on top of a broken tv makes one a redneck, what does this tablet nonsense make me? Not sure I want to know. So, I untangled that, which involved crawling under the desk and poking cables down through the cutout. I also needed to undo the cable bundle that had the old tablet cable in it and put the new tablet cable in it instead.
By this time, I was starting to wish I’d decided to spend the day in bed, eating bon-bons and watching Matlock reruns.
Post-it notes? Let’s not go there. Suffice it to say that I found a lot of them, each and every one of which had some probably vital piece of information on it. Or what might have been vital information if it had been readable and/or complete. I wish I had a dollar for every post-it that had a phone number on it but no frickin clue who that phone number belonged to. In between all this frolicking with stacks and crap and stacks of crap, I had to stop the frolicking and actually try to do some real work.
This is how my Monday went. How was yours?’,’
