Possumblog

There must be a better way to store all those blueprints and rolled up thingys. How can you find anything in all that mess????

That's just it - people avoid asking him things because of the effort needed to find the necessary drawing. Or he may know where it is at but starts shuffling through other junk just to get rid of the bothersome requestor.

I liked the telephone under the drawing table. Is that for the super-secret double-ought agent calls, or just for hollerin' at Chet? Maybe it's just there so you don't have to hunt under piles of drawings whenever you hear the phone ring. Perhaps you can get your boss to requisition one of those shoe-phones.

There are, Francesca--flat files--but we don't get such things. As for knowing where stuff is, I have a system whereby I can find or lose things as expeditiously as is required by the circumstance. The actual answer is that most of that paper is not anything that would be urgently needed--I keep that in a place where it won't get mislaid. It's mostly old sketches and stuff that I just can't bring myself to throw away.

And Marc, you are right as to the effect this has on others--no one asks me for anything, and no one bothers to plunder through all my stuff looking for things. My boss is a particularly bad sort of person about this, and will come running in here and start opening file drawers without the slightest clue where to look for things. I'm not sure why he does that, but when I politely ask what I can help him find, it's invariably something I really don't have, or something that's in HIS office. ::sigh::

The telephone is for those times when I might decide to take a nap on the board underneath the table. Having the extension phone right there would allow me to be able to answer the phone without having to break my neck dashing over to my desk phone. It also allows me to talk at the table if I need to look and draw and talk all at once.

So I'm a skeptic. I think you photoshopped that picture of your clean desk. Nobody I know has a desk that clean.

And I think your office needs painting, per the File Cabinet Storage Annex Picture.

Well, you only need look at my sitting-and-typing-desk to know I have no shame about such things. And anyway, I don't have Photoshop, because the computer guys downstairs say I don't need it.

Painting? Oh, I'd say so. I've been here ten years. It's never been painted since I've been here. I don't think it's been painted since about 1978 or so. The big weird-looking thing on the wall is a hunk of corkboard that got left on the wall during some renovation in the past. Rather than try to get the rest of it and the glue around it off, they just painted over everything.

It reminds me of the widely distributed picture of the painted-over roadkill possum.