A Cautionary Tale for Those Who Keep a Messy Office (Like Me!)

I finally spent about an hour and a half going through the 16 months' worth of old mail, catalogs, rejects from the printer, schoolwork, check stubs, and various other detritus. For the first time in ages, I can see both the carpet and my desktop. It sure is nice! That's the good news.

I had weeks during the winter break from work and school that I could have done this. But of course I didn't. Why now? Well, it's funny you should ask. Earlier in the week, I extracted a few pieces of music from my vast pile of sheet music to play for this Sunday's church service, and, as usual, brought them upstairs to my office so I could copy the titles and composers into an e-mail so they could be listed in the Order of Service. At least, I thought I brought them upstairs.

The week got busy. My online class, Business Strategies, started. I added blizzards of syllabus and PowerPoint printouts to the ankle-deep mess on the floor. I accepted a job as rehearsal pianist for the Bedford High musical, Guys and Dolls. Must print out the rehearsal schedule, contact info, Google Map to the school, etc. There are tons of papers all over the place related to my Treasurer duties at the church--financial statements, board meeting paperwork, etc--in several separate piles. I suppose I ought to get to that and stop procrastinating, I thought.

It's funny how well I can adapt, to a point, to navigating in a mess. I rarely spend more than a couple of minutes looking for a particular piece of paper before finding it. But then there comes that one time that the thing you're looking for, in this case, my music for Sunday, seems to have disappeared into a parallel universe. Couldn't find it before work this morning. Oh, well, I thought, I'll find it this afternoon.

But I couldn't. Really, I went through everything, even the paper recycling box. The horrible thought occurred to me: what if I had mistakenly dumped it into the recycling that I already took out and got rid of? I looked at the playlist I had e-mailed to the church office. Had I unintentionally memorized any of it from the last time I played it? How well could I fake it, if necessary? Most of it was fairly obscure ragtimes and fiddle tunes. How noticeable would it be if I had to make up large sections of it? Or would it be better to just pick something else and make an announcement? Not that anyone would notice the difference--or would they?

I didn't have any memory of putting it back in the tattered plastic library bag where I keep all of my xeroxed copied music, but I looked there, since I had now exhausted every other alternative. It wasn't in the top of the pile. But seven or eight pieces down, there it was. I heaved a great sigh of relief.

I guess the moral of the story is: Don't let the layer of papers become such a permanent part of your office floor that the cat walks on it and even naps on it because he thinks it's part of the floor.