Stuff

There's a lot of movement in my office lately - post-reorg, people are being relocated, are being laid off, or are outright quitting. What was once a fairly bustling floor is now almost dead silent. Today, a Friday in August when half of who's left is on vacation, feels more like a Saturday or a Sunday.

For all the people they are moving out (into another building), there seems to be no unified plan. I've worked for large corporations before, and there usually was a facilities staff, something that doesn't seem to exist here. Everything is pretty much self service, and a lot of the support functions are outsourced. If you are moving, you go online and fill out forms and one person comes and unplugs your computer equipment, and another shows up and packs it, and another transports it, etc. etc. But in the meantime, the closets and file cabinets and storage rooms are filled with stuff: old files, excess office supplies, boxes of forgotten personal stuff, etc. Nobody has responsibility for those areas - and nobody is taking any, and so it just stays behind.

It boggles my mind - maybe because I'm a Virgo, or maybe because I hate unnecessary clutter, or maybe because I'm stuck here surrounded by it. But I imagine that years and years after I leave here, there still will be cartons of white 2 1/2 inch ring binders behind the coats in the hall closet and several dozen boxes of staples at the back of a drawer in the corner cubicle.

I thought about it after 9/11 - it was almost easier to deal with the horror of the buildings and the people just disappearing if I concentrated instead on the stuff that vaporized with them. The boxes of binder clips, the drawers of unused computer cables, the shelves of copy paper. Thousands of staplers crushed into nothing.