The Ginormous Office Project, Week Two
Jul 28th, 2007 by Alex
It’s actually been a month since I started my office cleaning project. It is only the second weekend that I’ve put any real time into it. It looked like it was going to be hot and humid out this afternoon so I decided to take another couple hours at it. I’m proud to say that the carpet is making a comeback.
The boxes stacked on the couch are empty. The crap stacked on the couch is all ready to be sold on Craigslist or given away to fellow geeks. The book shelf is starting to fill out. Books now fill the top two shelves, office supplies in the middle, sorting area for the rest of this stuff on the last two.
I’m finding all sorts of things.
- my cycling gloves
- a lot of incense from Sunshine Octopus in Rehoboth Beach
- scripts and tech notes from theatrical productions that I’ve worked on, notably Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs
- copious notes from my college networking courses that still serve as excellent reference
- a lot of Wintergreen Altoids
- a notebook from Mr. May’s high school biology class, with the diagrams and rules stuck to the pages with a glue stick
- several Master locks that I never threw away the keys for, thinking (correctly) that I’d find the locks again
- a book of thirty-three cent stamps which somehow with the old book of 23 cent postcard stamps I’ll be able to mail some extra-heavy letters to people
- a dozen comic anthologies from strips such as Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, and Garfield; looking forward to rotating them back onto the coffee table again
A lot of this stuff is old. Very old. I’m trying to take the Miracle cloth to everything as I reorganize but there is a lot of dust and I’ve been sneezing all afternoon.
I had clipped the following two paragraphs out a Post article “In North Virginia Drug Ring, Good Kids Went Bad”, August 12, 2001. I don’t know why I clipped it. There’s no notes on the page.
“American society doesn’t want to face the fact that white kids deal and use drugs,” the dealer said. “They simply can’t look in my face and see that a nice-looking white kid is selling drugs to their kids, because that would mean that their kids could do this, too.
“The fact is that we do sell drugs to their kids, in their rich neighborhoods and in their rich schools.”
A nod to the monetary value of some of the items I’ve found, the value of all of the memories that going through all of it is bringing back can’t be measured. I’m really glad that I didn’t chuck it all.
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Speaking of both Brighton Beach and Mr. May, I’m now hired at Meade High, going to be the TD, and Mr. May will be one of my administrator/bosses. Everything really does come back if given a chance.
Sunshine Octopus reminds me of high school. I was an aspiring hippie then.
No matter how happy I am with my life, I know that I can always find dissatisfaction in my own life by looking at the success in others lives. Most of all, I am jealous of those people I know who really do have a place for everything and everything in its place. Best of luck in your cleaning effort. You should know that I will likely start a similar effort of my own this weekend. With luck I will get it going in my own house and not the home of some random stranger.
P.S. For what it’s worth, lately I’ve found it very satisfying to recycle old computers and donate old clothes. They open up space quickly and you can always live under the illusion that you are making somebody else’s life better.
danielle: Aspiring? Not accomplished? What happened?
Special K: Don’t feel bad. Just because I’m cleaning doesn’t mean I have a clue where all of this crap is going to go. I think that covers most of us. Even those people who appear to have everything together have a storage locker somewhere with boxes of junk. Out of sight but still present. I donate a set amount of clothes every year. I try to sell hardware first and would donate but by the time I’m done with it it has little value to anyone but tinkering geeks. No one wants an old/slow PC board and memory, drives smaller than you can get with a new iPod, etc.
what happened? - a mortgage, i guess.
i moonlight as a hippie still. i’m a bit bummed that i couldn’t go to the All Good Festival this year, even though i bought tix the day they went on presale, and can’t go to The Recipe Family Cookout either.
when i “clean” i seem to end up not being able to find where i put everything “away.”