No, I’m not talking about the copy machine or legal pads, but odd little things one carries home from the office.
I’m a college prof and am really into the mini-size binder clips. I use 'em in every clipalacious situation possible. I also have a habit of clipping them to my belt loops, suit lapels, and pocket trim and forgetting they are there. Some of them go through the wash dozens if not hundreds of times or end up part of an impressive mini clip collection in my sock drawer (I always mean to take them to work, but it never happens.)
I read your thread title and the binder clips are what I was going to post about. I use them to close potato chip bags. Sometimes I use them as barettes. A friend of mine welded them to a metal frame to hold targets for target practice. They really come in handy. Post-it notes are another good thing to bring home from the office.
Binder clips? Odd? I bought a whole package of 'em once. With my own frickin money. Hey, the freelance life is a rough one.
My idea of an OOW is a product sample, the more useless the better. I used to have about a 2"x3" hunk of welded steel tube, rectangular in cross section, from the Welded Tube Company of America. I acquired the hunk during my brief and tragic stint at an insurance company. Right now I think it’s rusting slowly out on my patio. Made a helluva paperweight, though.
Regular paperclips. See, um, I am a fidgeter. I can’t sit still very well. One of my weirder fidgeting habits involves paperclips. I untwist them and make little paperclip sculptures and whatnot.
The reason they sometimes end up coming home with me is that I occasionally stick them in my ears. I have three holes in each ear, and I only use the first holes nowadays. I realize this is unhygienic, but I’ve had the holes for 23, 16, and 9 years, respectively, and I haven’t had an ear infection since I was four, so I figure I’m safe.
And, of course, my coworkers find my office supply jewelery very attractive.
Magnets that engineers used to hold blueprints and Dilbert strips to the metal cubication. They made dandy doorstops while I was waiting for a floor to dry. Just stick it to the doorframe on the hinge side. I think I have about a dozen.
Once I swiped a cheapo pocketknife from a guy’s desk. It had his initials crudely carved in the handle. He had an unusual name, so I remembered him when I ran across the knife in my toolbox 20 years later. I took it back to work, and I left it under a piece of paper on his desk. It must have been a strange moment when he found it.
Mmmmmm…binder clips. I swear I’m the only person who uses them in our department. Oh, well. That means the boxes and boxes of them in the supply cabinet are just for me!
I used to work at a photo studio preparing high school seniors for their senior portraits. I velcroed them in to backless tuxedos and velvet drapes, warned them that their lipliner made them look like a clown and reasoned with them when they spent an hour locked in our bathroom blow-drying their hair and wrecking the day’s schedule.
My weapons of choice were the bobby pin and the clothes pin. They hold clothes on. The fix hair. They shorten necklaces. When you watch those movies where the geeky girl with glasses takes down her hair, get conatacts and becomes the hottest girl in high school- there are surely bobby pins at work.
In the rush, these pins often get shoved in my hair, clipped to my clothes, put in my pockets or dropped in any odd place I can find. Sometimes I’ll put on a pair of pants and find three pins stuck in the wasteband, two in a pocket, and five on various beltloops. I still find them around even though I havn’t worked there for months.
Binder clips, of course, but I don’t have to swipe 'em; I work at home, and they’re sent to me with work I do. So I have a never-ending supply of binder clips and rubber bands.
The strangest thing I ever got from an office was actually something I loved so much I went out and bought several for myself (just in case I misplaced one or three) – the world’s best staple remover. A friend who was removing the screens from the back porch even used one to get the staples out of the wood; he said it was the best tool he’d ever used for that purpose.