# I can see my desk!!!!! It appears to be some kind of "wood". **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [September 21, 2007, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015 "2007-09-21T18:20:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Man\_With\_a\_Cat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/cab0a1/32.png) [@Man\_With\_a\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Man_With_a_Cat)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/1 "2007-09-21T18:20:56Z")
I am the proud occupant of what is normally, the World’s Most Cluttered Desk. Mind you, I can find anything on it; the piles are organized both chronologically, and by subject in a proprietary organizational method known only to me. Calandars, office supply cups, squeezee stress toys, speakers, the ubiquitous notepad, and a paper towel folded into a coaster complete the scene. The credenza behind me, a corner unit, was declared last year by the UN to be a No-Enter Zone. Piles (again) of folders, manuals, old pictures, CD’s, my Rangers beer mug, my dressed up goose, at least 2 desk clocks made up just the bottom shelf. The top was more or less a pile of whatever I put down while I’d be on the phone. I had three full-size boxes of files, and a tub of mapping software and manuals on my floor. This morning, I just got a burst of **Clean Energy** , and went at it. Things were tossed, things were put in the office supply cabinet, things were organized and the desk was wiped down. Did you KNOW common desk-dirt could be green? :eek: Anyway, my in-box has three envelopes in it, my “to-do” pile of folders is neatly on the corner of my desk, the notepad is primed and ready, and I can see my desk! I’m not altogether sure I like this, but I’ll make some sort of effort in the coming days to keep things this way, just to see. ---
**Author:** ![twickster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ec9cab/32.png) [@twickster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/twickster)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/2 "2007-09-21T18:26:48Z")
Take a picture. 😛 twicks, whose underlings don’t know what to do if too many days go by without my whining “I’ve got too much stuff on my desk!” ---
**Author:** ![Hal\_Briston](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a9a28c/32.png) [@Hal\_Briston](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hal_Briston)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/3 "2007-09-21T18:36:43Z")
When we moved into our new home last year, one of the wondrous features was that it had a laundry room. Not a closet or a small alcove with a washer and dryer – a full-fledged laundry _room_. So, we took the bags of accumulated laundry and boxes of seasonal clothing and piled them all in. And there they’ve sat for the past year. I do laundry all the time – we have the things in circulation that get worn quite a bit, but still, there has been a mountain of clothing in there that has gone ignored. Yesterday, I decided “enough”. I spent my lunch hour pulling every piece of clothing out of the laundry room and moving it to the living room. My idea was that as we watched TV last night, my wife and I could sort it all out – throw away useless clothing, bag up and donate things that we’ll never wear again, and get the good stuff back into circulation. Now, after I loaded all this into the living room, I realized that my wife and daughter would be home an hour later, but it would be several hours before the little one would be off to bed and my wife and I could tackle this project. So, I took a big blanket and covered up this massive pile. My daughter couldn’t have been more thrilled if she had found a pile of magical ponies farting fairy dust all over the living room. She spent the next couple of hours climbing to the top of the mountain and tumbling back down again, laughing her fool head off the whole while. Oh yeah…the point of all of this – hey, look! I can see the laundry room floor! It appears to be some kind of “carpet” and “linoleum”! ---
**Author:** ![VunderBob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/839c29/32.png) [@VunderBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VunderBob)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/4 "2007-09-21T18:56:03Z")
[QUOTE=Hal Briston] My daughter couldn’t have been more thrilled if she had found a pile of magical ponies farting fairy dust all over the living room. [/QUOTE] That, sir, is one mighty fine piece of literature. ---
**Author:** ![susan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/susan/32/17537_2.png) [@susan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/susan)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/5 "2007-09-21T19:50:54Z")
My desk at work appears to have been under the pile the whole time! Who knew? ---
**Author:** ![Rico](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rico/32/3582_2.png) [@Rico](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rico)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/6 "2007-09-21T20:50:03Z")
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. **If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is an empty desk the sign of?** ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/7 "2007-09-21T20:57:37Z")
[QUOTE=VunderBob] That, sir, is one mighty fine piece of literature. [/QUOTE] No, it’s “litter-ature”. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![mnemosyne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c4cdca/32.png) [@mnemosyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mnemosyne)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/8 "2007-09-21T22:14:25Z")
Our bedroom is clean. The closets are organised, the clothing is all (except for the last load of laundry) put away, it looks great. In cleaning the bedroom, we bagged up a lot of old clothes that we didn’t want, and threw out some other stuff, and found things that we decided would be better off in the living room, or stored in the closet in the dining room, or whatever. We must have spent a good 4 hours just organising and cleaning. The pile of things we didn’t want was placed in the kitchen (which the bedroom connects to), but then we wanted to cook dinner, so the pile got moved to the dining room… where it has been for the past 2 weeks. It’s mostly bags ready to go to a thrift store or charity, but we haven’t bothered to find out which is closest to us, and the rest, to be sorted into the living room… well, the living room is a mess too! One room at a time, but we tend to tackle one room every couple of months, so this apartment should be organized and everything will be in it’s place… oh… somewhere Fall 2009 I guess! ---
**Author:** ![Mindfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mindfield/32/19759_2.png) [@Mindfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mindfield)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/9 "2007-09-21T22:38:43Z")
My current desk is kinda cluttered, but in my defense I have a lot of stuff that I kinda need close at hand. In Ye Days of Yore however, it was a right mess of all manner of papers containing miscellaneous notes, bits of hex codes and programming notes, game notes (RPGs y’know, they make you write all kinds of stuff down), phone numbers, addresses, BBS passwords (in case I lost the macros/autologins in my terminal program), and all manner of other written bits. But I knew where everything was (and more importantly, _what_ it was for) so it was an organized clutter. 🙂 I do still keep papers and stuff around, but I got a large (36x18"), clear desk mat on top of my desk to both protect from spills and to put important papers I can see at a glance and won’t get moved around when I move other stuff around. It works out quite well. ---
**Author:** ![bbs2k](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e495f1/32.png) [@bbs2k](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bbs2k)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/10 "2007-09-21T22:43:02Z")
I decided to clean up my desk last month. I removed everything that I didn’t know how to organize and put it on my futon for organizational review. I haven’t seen my futon since. ---
**Author:** ![Kat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b19c9b/32.png) [@Kat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kat)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/11 "2007-09-21T23:07:11Z")
I just cleaned off my dining room table. It appears to be wood as well. I’m taking a break now. Next: the floor. ---
**Author:** ![Spatial\_Rift\_47](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a8b319/32.png) [@Spatial\_Rift\_47](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spatial_Rift_47)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2007, 6:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/12 "2007-09-22T06:16:28Z")
Wait, you mean piles of stuff have supporting surfaces underneath? Nuh uh, no way. I’ll believe that when I believe that the Earth itself is actually some sort of rounded shape. _pbththt_ ---
**Author:** ![jackelope](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a6a055/32.png) [@jackelope](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackelope)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2007, 7:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/13 "2007-09-22T07:14:30Z")
OK, this passage was so appropriate that I’ve gone and dug up my copy of Thomas Pynchon’s _Gravity’s Rainbow_ to reproduce it. **Mr Bus Guy** , see if the following description (of the desk of a WWII English intelligence officer) rings any bells: > [@](#): > > Tantivy’s desk is neat, Slothrop’s is a godawful mess. It hasn’t beeen cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer’s Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop’s mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string, chalk . . . above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs including “Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland” (“He does have some rather snappy arrangements,” Tantivy reports, “he’s a sort of American George Formby, if you can imagine such a thing,” but Bloat’s decided he’d rather not), an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts of the amber left eye of a Weimaraner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate-blue veining in a distant cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset), rivets in the skin of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up girl . . . a few old Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2, a busted corkscrewing ukulele string, boxes of gummed paper stars in many colors, pieces of a flashlight, top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his blurry brass reflection, any number of reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down the hall–a dictionary of technical German, an F.O. _Special Handbook_ or _Town Plan_–and usually, unless it’s been pinched or thrown away, a _News of the World_ somewhere too–Slothrop’s a faithful reader. ---
**Author:** ![Man\_With\_a\_Cat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/cab0a1/32.png) [@Man\_With\_a\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Man_With_a_Cat)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2007, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/14 "2007-09-22T13:42:09Z")
That’s pretty much the picture. ---
**Author:** ![LucyInDisguise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucyindisguise/32/18064_2.png) [@LucyInDisguise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LucyInDisguise)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2007, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/15 "2007-09-22T17:02:17Z")
[QUOTE=Mindfield] My current desk is kinda cluttered, but in my defense I have a lot of stuff that I kinda need close at hand. In Ye Days of Yore however, it was a right mess of all manner of papers containing miscellaneous notes, bits of hex codes and programming notes, game notes (RPGs y’know, they make you write all kinds of stuff down), phone numbers, addresses, BBS passwords (in case I lost the macros/autologins in my terminal program), and all manner of other written bits. But I knew where everything was (and more importantly, what it was for) so it was an organized clutter.\ [/QUOTE] A perfect description of my desk, sans differences in professional details. And these days are ‘Ye Days of Yore’. For many years I’ve had a small brass placard mounted on wood and placed prominently upon my desk which read: **Please don’t straighten the mess on my desk …** you’ll confuse me and screw up my whole world. Periodically, however, roughly about every three months (or about 10 days before I need to do quarterly reports), my wife deems “enough” to have been “enough” and procedes to screw up my whole world. Her concept of logic where filing is concerned would make perfect sense to Inspector Clouseau. Or The Three Stooges. It is sometimes many weeks before I find the stuff that was right there next to the desk pad under last weeks Activity Report with 2 pink stickies upon which were written the relevent last for digits of customer’s phone numbers and right next to the stack of Bills of Lading which I need to copy for clients prior to filing and on top of … well, you get the picture. Two weeks ago, “Enough” became way too much. (I still haven’t found the box of 9 reams of printer paper, four manuals, three replacement cartridges for the fax machine the two sticky notes with vital account codes that were hidden under the last page in the desk pad for “safe keeping”, or, and this is the most frustrating of all, my cartridge in a bare tree! [A rifle cartridge hanging by a piece of string tied to a twig mounded on a wooden base. It’s a parody christmas ornament …]) And so: the small brass placard has been converted to an 11x17" laminated sign permanently mounted upon the door to my office. And she did not get a key to either of the two new deadbolts. 😃 I’ll probably end up buying her a straight jacket for X-mas. Just thinking about the mess that must surely exist behind door #3 is already driving her nuts! Lucy ---
**Author:** ![CairoCarol](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cairocarol/32/3825_2.png) [@CairoCarol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CairoCarol)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2007, 8:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/16 "2007-09-23T08:26:27Z")
I have a solution for when household clutter becomes too overwhelming: MOVE. A friend once dubbed this the “slash and burn” mode of home organization. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Goob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c77e96/32.png) [@Mr.Goob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Goob)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2007, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-can-see-my-desk-it-appears-to-be-some-kind-of-wood/420015/17 "2007-09-23T14:50:13Z")
Years ago my boss had a regular desk and a confrence table next to it that were anywhere from a few inches deep to two foot high stacks of papers. To say he was disorganized would be a compliment. I was like his Radar O’Reilly to Col. Blake. Here, sign this and this, call this person and do this next. I was his living blackberry. Then my chance came, he went on an extended vacation for over three weeks. I found printed copies of emails that were 5 or 6 years old. There was documentation for jobs that had been completed years before. Some of the customers and vendors I found notes to had gone out of buisness and faded into memory. By day three I was wearing ear plugs because the constant whine of the paper shredder was boring into my skull. My fingers were numb from filing countless documents in the six four drawer cabinets in the room. I had to beg the witch in the supply office to do a run for more bankers boxes for cold storage. I think there was a betting pool going by my coworkers if I would only get yelled at, fired or fed into the shredder myself. That Monday I went in and was scared to see his car already in the lot. Shit, I planned on having coffee ready and easing him into the office. I went in and he was sitting there in slack jawed amazement. He said he always wanted to tidy up but just never got around to it. I moved across the building shortly after that for a different job. I’d pop in to see him once in a while and sadly the process was repeating itself.