I will never claim to be the neatest person- I have a hard time with clutter. Actually, my enemy is time itself. I have a hard time finding the time to deal with the clutter. My parents had Sofia stay with them last weekend, and when I got to their house on Sunday to visit for a bit before taking her home, my mother exclaimed “Look at my house! I don’t know how you do it, because I haven’t been able to get at thing done!” Welcome to my world, Mom. On top of the day to day upkeep of a house, my daughter emits some sort of cosmic force that turns the average household UPSIDE DOWN. It happens wherever she goes. I actually take comfort in the knowledge that if I share her, I am not alone in my suffering. My son is just starting to understand the power of his time-suckage capabilities, and it will not be long before he is operating at full capacity. Shudder.
So as the state of my home-life declines from this whirlwind machine that feeds off time, sucking it in and producing one large obstacle course for my very own in-house entertainment, I have one piece of my world that I do control: my workspace. I keep it fairly clean considering I eat two meals a day at my desk, have 3 phones, two monitors, seven 5X7 frames proudly displaying my two time suckers, two trophies, a plant that is always a step away from death, and shelves of manuals, binders, and project files. There’s nothing on the floor in my cube (yep, I sit smack in the middle of a cube farm, an unfortunate symptom of a call center programming job) and my walls have my certifications and necessary pinups (yes, my picture of Billy Corgan is necessary) all neatly and symmetrically placed.
Across the aisle from my nicely organized cube, is what has to be hands down the most cluttered, unorganized cube in the company, and possibly the entire US workforce. This individual shall remain nameless, but let it be said that his clutter had grown at one point to such excess, that multiple boxes, piles of books and files, trinkets, even trophies had spread their way to the unoccupied cube next door. People in charge of the facilities pleaded with him to get it under control- giving him extra closet space and file cabinets. I’m not really sure if he ever tried, but the clutter none the less just continued to grow. I started to wonder if he had a little time suckage clutter gnome of his very own somewhere in the near vicinity, but none could be found.
Eventually, a coworker in my sister department was assigned the unoccupied cube, and was in utter dismay to find the cube still filled with the aforementioned boxes, books, and files on the afternoon before his scheduled move. The owner of the clutter was away at a conference, and much discussion ensued among powers that be over how/who was going to clean the cube out, and where the heck to put it all. No one wanted to take on this daunting task, and a stalemate crowd began to form in the aisle next to me with tempers rising by the heightened, negative energy the mound of clutter continued to emit. I eventually got aggravated and said, “bring me two cases and I’ll have it done in ten minutes.” The cases quickly arrived. I filled them with the files and trinkets, and along with the boxes placed them in the offender’s primary cube.
Shortly there after, I got a call from the clutter offender. He had heard that I had taken control of the situation and expressed gratitude for cleaning up his over-fill. I expressed to him that he might not be thanking me when he returned to work the next day. I told him where he could find his things. I laughed rather loudly when he suggested that he thought I would have organized everything for him in a closet or file cabinet. I corrected his delusions and assured him he had not found his own personal cleaning lady. Instead, this was the actual results:
A brave move on my part, considering I have to sit next to him every day, and perhaps the funniest workspace joke I’ve pulled in my career. He took it in strides. Sadly, I wasn’t in early enough the next morning to see the look on his face when he realized he had to dig his way to his chair. But he did eventually find his desk. Now excuse me while I try to find my family room rug.
