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Writer and editor Home > Blogs > Brain Droppings > Archives > 2006 > April > 07 > Entry
HA! My desk is LOTS messier…
All right, I’ve had quite ENUFF of all this silliness about who’s got the messiest desk around here. You’ll find a fun story on our site this morning about a nice lady in Centerville who supposedly has the messiest, and the same story talks about our rewrite guy Hal Davis, who supposedly has the Best Mess in the DDN Newsroom…
Uh-huh. Blah, blah, blah.
I’ve got ‘em all beat.
Yez, fans, Yours Truly, the Brain Dropper hisself, can proudly lay claim to Messiest Desk You May Find Anywhere honors in these here parts…
My office on fifth floor of the downtown DDN building is a maze (yes, you need a map to get in and out, or at least it’s helpful) of books piled high, CDs brimming off shelves, stacks of old newspapers I SWEAR i’ll need someday, a couple of file cabinets stuffed with shrunken heads, plastic rayguns and other assorted curios, mounds of work papers upon my desk that range from news budgets to page proofs to story notes to press releases to photos to letters to more CDs to more books to magazines to more magazines to more press releases…
The walls of my office are filled (yes, filled… no wall space is allowed to be visible) with assorted posters, newspaper tearsheets, calendars old and current, postcards and other art (yes! art!) that basically resembles the inside of my brain … which is not a pretty place, let me tell you what. My favorite decoration: a poster of The Sopranos gang in which a few years ago, Local News Editor Jim Dillon came in and placed Post-Its on the characters, labelling them according to their Newsroom counterparts. And of course, I got to be Tony. My poster, after all.
The piece de resistence, however, is my personal pile of toys and other junk, a constantly growing and shifting thing that occupies the space between my keyboard and computer. There you will find old toys, action figures, bottle caps, cool bits of rusty metal, old keys, stones and seashells, pieces of colored glass, assorted shiny and colorful things of all sorts. A coworker accuses me of being like a crow, “attracted to shiny stuff.” I guess. People like to come in and visit and see what’s new in the pile. One of our IT staff loves to sit at my desk, where she marvels at all the craziness. Her place is meticulous, btw. See? I’m providing entertainment for the neatniks out there, and happy to oblige.
I do manage to find the things I need in all this, and I really do clean the place up from time to time, dragging in a big trashcan and laying waste to the waste. But I do believe that this all works for me. My car is always tidy, our house is usually pretty well straightened up, I dress reasonably neatly — and so I figure that my desk is the one place where My Inner Mess can let itself work out. Besides, I sorta feel that by letting all the white noise in my brain fill the office space, it focuses me on my work. Or at least, I tell myself that. Anyway, once we move our building from downtown to South Main Street in a fe w months, some of this stuff will have to get thrown out anyway. Probably. Some.
The real problem is that people keep sending me stuff! PR reps, marketing companies, my coworkers… All this paper piles up… and face it, you never know when you might need it.
Besides, once you put something in a file, you know what happens: It never comes out again. Outta sight, outta mind. So keep what you need in sight.
Right under this big ol’ pile of really important papers here….
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