Sunday, November 14, 2010

You may be a hoarder if...

...like me, you purchased bulk staples, paper clips, and pencils the year you started graduate school (for me it was 1994) AND STILL HAVE UNUSED ONES. Good god.

Even worse, I forgot where some of these were (shoved into a box labeled "office supplies" in a linen closet in our hallway) and have been mooching off of Bullock since I moved in with him. And all this time I still had one full box of 5000 staples, five 100-count boxes of paper clips, and four 12-count boxes of unused pencils. Also in the mysterious box o' supplies: a life-time supply of unused "daily schedule" sheets for the 8"x10" Day Runner I no longer use; a bunch of 3" or 4" D-ring binders; some blank composition notebooks; unused letterhead from my graduate program department (WTF, why did that even move with me to RBU???); and, my favorite, 3.5" floppy disks with with system and program backups for a computer I no longer own.

Sigh.

Updated to add: Oh wait, there's more. One of the big D-ring binders has my undergraduate institution's name on it and inside are labeled dividers with labels such as "company info/lit" and "cover letters (copies)." In other words, this was the binder I used to organize my job applications in the Spring of freaking 1991! *headdesk*

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay, missy. Relinquish that Costco membership this instant.

Anonymous said...

I'm actually going through this stuff in my recently-rented flat and trying not to move so much extraneous crap with me next time. A lot of paper has been recycled. This has revealed, among other things I'd forgotten, that I applied for my own data-monkey job in Cambridge five years before I actually walked into it, and didn't get it...

Sisyphus said...

Hey, hey, it's all good --- reduce, reuse, recycle, right?

My mom still has a lot of my elementary school binders and folders that she neatly cleans out and re-uses whenever she has a new project. I always hated that, since I would get tired of the "strawberry shortcake trapper keeper" or whatever after one year.

It's not hoarding, its thrifty. And no, you may not look at the number of chapsticks I have in my medicine cabinet.

Bardiac said...

I have office supplies my dad's company bought. That company closed in the late 80's. And I have a feeling that some of those office supplies weren't of recent purchase, either.

Bardiac said...

ps. We have a "free books" shelf, and I've recycled campus binders there. They get picked up and reused that way, so that someone can write on their future-techno-thingy about how they hoard free binders. :)