Thanks to all who contributed recipes to T-Bone's Dinner Project. The deadline has passed, but I will still accept recipes indefinitely. However, for the purposes of the contest, in the event of a tie, the one submitted earliest will win. It will take a bit of time for me to compile the savory selections, narrow them down to the best of the best, test the top 5 and select a winner. Afer naming a winner, I will put all the recipes in some sort of format for distribution. Thanks again!
Does your desk at home or work look like this? Of course it doesn't! If your workspace is anything like mine, you've forgotten what the work surface looks like because of filing by piling. Not long ago, my desk was always clean, neat and organized. What changed?
I don't know. I wish I knew. My previous jobs (at newspapers – kingpins of paper usage), as busy as I was, always allowed time for me to keep it all together. I've always worked in a paper-driven office – maybe it's because my current digs take a paper-driven life to the extreme that the tide has turned against me. Either way, here's some things I've come to realize about having a messy desk and the use of paper:
1. Important people have messy desks.
2. You can still get work done from a messy desk.
3. A messy desk makes you look busier than you may happen to be at the moment.
4. If someone you'd rather not talk to wanders into your cubicle, you can start shuffling random papers around to block out the person's voice.
5. Piles of papers make it more plausible that you've forgotten or lost something.
6. A recent study suggests tall people have higher salaries. While I can't overcome my genetic reality (5'7'' on a good day), I can increase the height of my on-desk paper stacks.
7. Using paper keeps recycling companies, paper mills and lumberjacks employed. Just doing my part for the economy, folks. I have a good friend whose job it is to fly paychecks out of state, so I know my logic here is sound.
8. It's not really killing trees if they're already dead by the time I use my paper.
9. Paper is fun. Think of all the little grade-school things you can do with it: paper airplanes, triangular paper footballs, those fortune-teller thingees, ninja stars, origami sculptures, passing notes, etc. It's no coincidence that the word "caper" rhymes with paper.
10. Books are made of paper, which elevates paper's purpose to one of the easy distribution of intellectual expression, important information and the growth of knowledge. Where would the world be without Mad magazine? Do we want to know?
It is important to conserve the world's precious resources. Recycling, conservation and other related efforts are worthwhile endeavors. But paper is here, and in some form I think it will always be around. At least on my desk.
A triangular paper football...man I havn't made or played with one of those in decades...I think it's time to turn one of these reports on my desk into one...
"file by pile" - that's my system with a yellow sticky on top to tell me what the pile is for.
Such a clean desk cannot possibly exist. It must be an urban legend. Or else that picture was computer generated to torture us all with an unattainable goal. Much like the bodies of supermodels.
My desk is piled 5 feet high with crap - papers, files, old cups of coffee. Yee-hah!!
Shuffle them around so that you don't have to talk to the people at your desk. MY GOD we are TWINS! I do that all the time. It's just that I am SOOOOOO busy.
heh heh heh.
p.s. You will always be my number one blog crush. Poems mean nothing when it comes to the world of lurve!
Usually every night before I leave I dedicate time to organizing my piles. It doesn't always work but hey...I try.
I have to agree with lotus. That picture is eerie. I have toyed with the idea of posting a pic of my desk and office in hopes that people might take up a collection to get me one of those organizational gurus. More likely, they would call an exterminator or report me as a fire hazard.
hey...where did you get that picture of my desk...that is my desk...so fresh and so clean, clean...okay...my desk looks like a it was hit by a tornada...or a granada...but i think i'm a little inspired by this picture.
what changed? i would rather get the hell outta the building at the end of the day...want no part of spending the few minutes making everything perfect. does that make me bad?
Paper-driven office indeed. If my desk is any indication--and, oh yes, I think it is--book publishers just might edge out newspapers for the title of Kingpin of Paper Usage. Oh, the paper cuts!
I agree, it is no coincidence that "caper" rhymes with paper. Anyway, I keep a messy desk because I am afraid to put anything away. If I don't see it, it doesn't exist. Yet, I have a photographic memory. Odd.
I hate to admit it, but my deskt is spotless. I am very highly organized - I tell people it's because I wear Wonder Woman underwear ;)
Wow. This is good information. I just found out I should be the most successful, most highly-paid person in our office. I'm going to march right in and tell my boss "look, my desk is the messiest desk on this floor and I'm 6 ft. tall with shoes on. How bout a raise?"
Ever since HIPAA, I haven't seen a piece of paper!
i WISH my desk looked like that!
i guess i'm one of the important people :)
At work my desk is an impressive mess, but before I go home I scrunch it into one pile and shove it in a drawer. In the morning I open the drawer, remove the pile and de-shove.
This way I always look busy at work and it looks like i'm done at the end of the day. :-)
At home it's a perpetual mess because
1. I don't have a drawer to shove stuff into
2. If I did have a drawer it wouldn't fit everything
3. I like to see my stuff (my excuse for being messy in general.)
it's all about #3
i've been really lousy about commenting lately. i just wanted to apologize, and say i read every day, i just can't always get it together to say something witty or profound, or at the very least profane. ummm, go yankees. ok. that's all. and, what's for dinner? any sneak previews?
Doesn't that office belong in the Colorado hotel closed for the winter where Jack Nicholson is caretaker?
If your desk looks anything like the one in the picture, you probably are bored at work blogging as you haven't got any real work to do! ;-)
Don't forget you can wet the end of it, place it on the floor and use it as a dust pan when you've misplaced the real one.
So you are saying that I seem to be the busient, most important person in my company... I better check on that. At 6'1" with a long reaching desk with paper stacks the size of McKinley, I must be God here!
See, any REAL desk should have toys. Action figures, icons, totems of some kind.
I am still laughing at #8! I go through cycles with my desk. I totally pile it up only to clean it off only to pile it up again. If only it were a rock and a hill...
I had no Idea that you were an apple guy steak-boy! LOVING IT!!!