Received an email stating that January was the National Get Organized Month. How sad it is to look at a desk that is neat and tidy. To see a clean desk gives no challenge to 'clean up this mess'. Secondly it eliminates the body exercise of placing extended hands, fingers thrust downward, upon a mass of papers to divine the location of an errant pen or pencil. And lost too is the mental-physical gymnastics required to mentally sort out and extract that piece of paper needed to meet a deadline. It takes an orderly mind to achieve order from disorder.
To show an attempt to enforce orderliness I return to the college years at the Psi Eta Pi fraternity house. After typing a term paper with several sections (this is before a PC computer filing system), I scattered the various pages in selected places around the room -chair, bookcase, floor, on top of shoes, and any other available spot of convenience. My next step meant collating the material into logical order. A requirement known as 'class attendance' intervened .
Upon returning from class I entered the room and into the middle of chaos. My strewn papers had vanished from around the room. On the desk was a neat stack of papers - the layering in random order. I had received a fringe benefit for living at the Psi Eta Pi fraternity house - the 'house-boy' ran the vacuum in my room on that day. This was his "Get Organized Day".
Mal was the 'house-boy'. In retrospect I do believe that Mal was a test case to support the passage of Murphy's Law.
'House-boy' is the term that the Census notes as his occupation. Today the term is 'house attendant' or 'home technician' or some other status enhancing,ill-defining term. Mal was proud that he was a veteran of WWI. He told me once that he had been shot in the Argonne (a vicious WWI battle site). In a joking way I asked if that were near the appendix. He said :"Just above it." A few days later he showed me his Honorable Discharge from the US Army. The reverse side reads: "Wounds received in service: None."
Too bad my room couldn't say the same thing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
First, hello, Chad's grandpa!
Second, my husband is always accusing me of interfering in the chaotic maelstrom that defines his "personal organization system". I can't help it, though. I'm a wife. We pick stuff up. We throw stuff away. We "lose" sweaty, grubby, torn favorite sweatshirts in the laundry.
It's my job.
I guess my generation has swapped out the piles of papers... and exchanged them for multiple windows which we must "alt-tab" through in order to collate our papers.
Post a Comment