Today, I moved my office. Actually, it began on Wednesday but I finished today. I moved all the way to. . .the room next door, but it may as well been across town for all of the hassles involved.
It is amazing what accumulates after four and a half years in the same room. Books in boxes (I have more shelf space in the new room), a lot of ring binders (some empty), files (only I understand the system), and stacks and stacks of paper. In a government office, paper flows in and in, sometimes out. You see something and think, I want to read this, and you set it aside with other stuff to read. Or you get quarter-final and semi-final drafts of various documents. You get maps. You get meeting agendas. They all end up in stacks on a corner of your desk, on a table, on the floor, on top of a file cabinet, wherever. Eventually they threaten to fall on somebody or catch fire through spontaneous combustion.
I jumped at the chance to change rooms in order to force myself to engage in some serioius TCO (Throw Crap Out). Now I have everything in a state of temporary pandemonium, but at least my computer works again. I irritated our ICS people by moving my computer myself. They think that's a job only they can do. Any fool can take a computer apart and put it back together; I can. Those stacks are sitting on two long window ledges where I cannot ignore them. I am going to engage in TCO until the window ledges have nothing but potted plants and maybe a couple of photos. And that's my New Year's Resolution for myself, a month early.
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