On Rats and Packing

I’ve started packing in earnest for my impending office move in mid-February.  Though I’m going to a “real” office for the following six months, in August I’ll be moving (with the rest of the office, from grunts to VPs) into small cubes.

The rule passed down is that they will only be moving 6 standard book boxes. Everything else needs to be gotten rid of, taken home, whatever.  And having now done support work for the folks who have already done moves into the new cube farms, I can appreciate that 6 boxes of “stuff” will be more than enough.

It will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who knows me that I am something of a pack rat. I tend to hold onto stuff that either (a) I can imagine wanting to reference in the future, or (b) has some emotional resonance to it.  Since nostalgia counts for emotional resonance, items in column (a) have a tendency to also drift over into column (b).

Obviously, my clutter of “stuff” has to be gone through in detail and packed, and I’ve been doing multiple passes and throwing a lot of files into the recycle bin, and carting a lot of things home.  But now that I’m a month away from the actual first move, and have my hands on the actual six boxes to pack — I’m getting into hard decision territory.

Take files. We’re being encourage to scan files that are needed, or package them for offsite storage. Most of my files, though, don’t lend themselves to the latter, and the former is time consuming.  The problem is, a lot of the files in question have become nostalgia items for me — files for big projects I’ve worked on, org charts that list names of colleagues of days gone by, performance review and hiring docs for everyone I’ve ever reviewed or hired.  Some of them exist electronically, but I’m not 100% certain of that.  A lot of them are of problematic future use, but once thrown out they’re gone forever.

Expense reports.  I have a copy of every expense report I’ve ever filed over the 25 years I’ve worked with the company.  Hell, I have expense report data that’s been purged from the company’s financial records as unnecessary.  But for me, they provide a view on travel — oh, yeah, I remember that trip … hey, that was the one time they sent me to the Netherlands, which was kind of cool … oh, that was a stone bitch of a meeting … — that my own memory doesn’t readily cue up.

Mugs.  I have long had a collection of mugs in my office. Some were work-a-day mugs with fun messages that I migrated to the office over the years.  Many were mugs from various business units I’ve worked with (or that we acquired), making them a small history book.

I’ve been hacking at both groups of mugs unmercifully.  If I love it dearly enough to want to keep at home, I’ve packed it for home (and very few of those; our supply of mugs in the basement could supply a small restaurant).  Mugs for business units — I’ve trimmed those back pretty ruthlessly to some key ones.  The rest, of both categories, I’ve fobbed off to the “communal mug cabinet” in the break room, where they will both serve useful lives and may be seen by me in the future.

Some things I simply can’t throw away, but have to take home.  My wall art, for example — we took some big pieces home over the weekend, and I’ll be bringing smaller pieces home on my lap on the train the next few weeks.  My collection of Justice League action figures, though … ugh.  They have to come home for the time being; I’m 98% there will be no space for them in the New Office Order.

The question on both of these, though, is … what do I do with them at home?  It’s not like we have a surplus of wall space dying to be filled, or empty shelves for the action figures.  But I hate to stash it all up away in the basement …

Then there are really hard decisions.

I got this pencil holder from my kids after my first year of teaching. It’s ugly, and heavy, and has a huge chip missing from it, and is nearly useless for purpose … but it’s a huge plaster-and-bright-paint blob of sentiment.

Do I take it home and find room for it there?  I can’t afford the space in my cube-to-be?  Or do I go ahead and toss it and rely on this photo now as my memory? (I’ll probably take the first course, for the record, but it’s this kind of thing that’s driving me nutty.)

Jim and Ginger have been going through their garage bays over the past couple of years — including boxes of stuff that Jim brought home from jobs in the past, some decades old.  I really want to avoid doing that in my basement in twenty years, too … but there is stuff I want to be reminded of …

Another factor is the utility of the items.  Is this something I’ll ever really need to use?  I’ve grown more pragmatic at home about getting rid of stuff, as “easy” storage space runs out.  I very much need to become more pragmatic about it, to be sure. But I’m very much trying to apply that lesson  to these boxes of stuff at work.

It’s painful. But it’s a good thing, too.