Tied to My Desk

In keeping with the 'ties' theme, I'm going to fill you in on what is on my desk. I think you will find this incredibly fascinating--I know I do.

In addition to the normal 'office' type stuff; you know, pens, stapler, tape dispenser, lamp, paper clips, I have on my desk the following:

A bottle of Hollister SoCal men's cologne
A bottle of Aveda Chakra-4 Balancing Body Mist
A Brighton coin purse containing change and a prepaid Starbucks card
Five shot glasses
A box of 380 ammunition (In case the balancing body mist and the shot glasses filled with some mind-numbing elixir don't do the trick.)

What? Oh, no. The ammo isn't for taking myself out. It's for the computer. The computer goes first.

I also have noise cancelling headphones for listening to music (which I rarely do), a sample of Treximet migraine medicine I got from my doctor over a year ago when i was experiencing excruciating exertion headaches. (I took one dose and it made me sick. So I'm not sure why I still have this on my desk other than it is a cute little round container that I thought might be useful for some other purpose once I toss the medicine.)

I have a green vase my son made me in art class. It has a chicken on the front. It contains a fake red peony. It's the only thing on my desk that makes me smile.

My desk isn't the worst that I've seen. I used to work in a mortgage loan department at a bank and my boss was notoriously bad at filing. How bad? He didn't do it. Period.

He had a credenza behind his desk that contained all the loan information for every single customer. On top of the credenza was a stack of papers six feet wide and three feet tall. I couldn't understand how he found anything. Ever. So one day I asked him why he didn't just let me organize it for him and get all that paperwork into proper folders in a file cabinet. He explained that if I did that, he wouldn't be able to find anything. So I said, 'fine, find me the original loan documents for cusotmer XYZ.'

He turned around, moved his hand across the stacks from left to right, stopped at stack number four, moved down eight inches and pulled out a rubber-band bound of papers. He looked at me. "Do you want the original or one of the revisions?"

"Nevermind," I said.

Here I sit, many years later, with a filing system that isn't even as good as that. My paperwork is in piles everywhere. If you asked me to find a particular item, it would take days to find it if I were lucky. Sometimes these things just get themselves lost. Or it could be the office cats are up to no good when we are not here. In fact, now that I think about it, Willow - the youngster, has an odd fascination with the paper shredder. Hmmmm.....

Until next time, I remain....

Tied to My Desk.

p.s. A study has shown (don't ask me which study!) that if you want to increase your creativity, you should put a plant on your desk. I don't currently have a plant on my desk unless you count the fake peony. Perhaps I will get one soon and blog about that.