The stuff in my desk

And no, I don't keep poppies in my desk. It'd probably be more fun if I did, but there you go.

My desk here at work is a bit of an oddity. It's one of those L-shaped corner dealies with a set of drawers on either side, but that's not the odd part. Nor is it odd that one side of it is almost entirely taken up with reference books (well, towards the wall anyway. There is still a work surface, honest). No, the odd part is that so much of the stuff in the desk (as opposed to on the desk) isn't really mine.

Long story on that one. It starts with me inheriting the desk from the person who used it before. It was never supposed to be my desk, really; Wheat asked me to move in to the office after a summer of being pestered by an attention-needy seasonal worker who helped himself to the desk even though it was still almost completely piled up with the boxes of the the previous inhabitant's belongings (we'd had to move everything out of the office side of the Centre for a building expansion. The person who belonged to the boxes left before bothering to unpack most of them). Wheat didn't want a possible repeat, so I took the desk. Which meant, of course, that the first little while of my using this workspace involved me trying to find find places to put someone else's shite things.

That was fun.

This person was also a stationery hoarder of the first degree. Apparently she had to have her own supply of... well, damned near everything, so I inherited the doomsday store of office supplies. I'm still using some of them, in fact.

Well, bit by bit I did manage to make the place a little more mine. My books, now. My toys, which get played with by all the visiting kids (and not-so-kids, which I find hilarious). My things in the locked side of the desk, but in the non-lockable side?

Office Supply Central. Still.

There's a reason for that, actually. Before I came to my current position I was working more casual hours than anything, and I more or less thought of this desk as a place where any of the interpreters could work if I wasn't around. And, since it was already the home of All Things Stationery, I just made sure that the interpreters knew that if they needed pencils, rulers, crayons, scissors, or anything else like that for programs they could find it right there instead of having to scour the building.

It's worked out not too badly, really. For the most part.

Occasionally the OCD kicks in, but for the most part it's worked out ok.

Now, thankfully I don't have to worry about the craft supplies anymore because they've since moved to a specific craft area, but I still have the pencils, golf pencils, and rulers. I also have a set of whiteboard pens and a few other odds and sods. People come in, grab what they need, and (usually) return them. It's fine. I encourage it.

I don't get what they do with the pens, though.

I only have a couple of pens in the desk. We don't usually use pens for programming, so the only pens I have are the ones I'm personally using. And it's understandable that when people are used to grabbing other things from that drawer, they'd also look there for a pen in a pinch. It's also understandable that the pens would migrate. Everyone has forgetful pen people in the workplace, right?

But my pens seem to rotate. One day there'll be two pens with our logo and nothing else. Then one of the logo pens will disappear and another type of pen will show up in its place. Then that pen will disappear and I'll have three logo pens. And then I'll gain a mechanical pencil...

Right now.... let's see... right now in my pen tray I have one logo pen, one capless pen that says Delta Hotels, one retractable pen that I think I remember putting there myself, the aforementioned mechanical pencil, three other pencils of dubious origin, two blue pencil crayons that decided to visit one day, five pieces of chalk for NO APPARENT REASON, an allen key, and a safety pin.

Maybe I should have a week of listing how the line-up changes?

Ah well. As long as they manage to leave me one working pen (and don't make a freaking mess when they're digging around for stuff. I have no idea how things got in the state they were in when I got here this morning), I'm still good with having a partially communal desk.




I sure wish someone would explain the reason for the chalk to me, however...