Onward and ...

They have once again announced that we are moving and that we need to be packing. I have packed. I packed and then unpacked and now I have to pack again, this time with snazzy pink labels for all my stuff.

Now, I have to decided if the item should get a label or if it is going in to a box and then the box should be labeled and not the item itself . If it is a computer thing, it has to be labeled and boxed because they are too tall for a lid so they go in a box sans lid but in that case they must be individually labeled.

Then there are the boxes themselves. I am limited to four boxes and four boxes only. I don’t have that much stuff until I have to box it up and suddenly it multiplies like that children’s book about the guy and his hats. He takes off a hat and he is wearing a hat, he takes off that hat and under it he as yet another hat and on and on. I box up a lot of stuff and there is a lot of stuff underneath it and when I box that up there is more underneath. I’ve been in the position only six months and I all ready have stuff under stuff.

This time I have been told that I will be moving next Thursday. I know that I don’t have to label my desk because my desk isn’t going with me, it is going it just isn’t going with me. I will not be in a formal cube in the new building. I am not really in a formal cube now, but it’s more cube-y then a real office. I have all the pieces of a cube but not the actual cube. It’s like cube separates. Grranimal Cube. Many months ago, prior to our last aborted move, my boss measured my desk and announced it isn’t going to fit. It seems like a small enough desk to me, but I’m bad at math.

Discovering that my desk was too big, my boss and I went to wander around a storage trailer and with the aid of a guy way too far up on my departmental flow chart for that kind of scutt work, picked out the least chewed up desk we could find that would fit. “Least chewed” not un-chewed. There are no unchewed up desks. You know how Tom Hanks said “There is no crying in baseball?”, there are no unchewed up desks for state employees. Even the really nice desks look as though they have been through the wars, as part of the rear echelon, but they were there. Oddly, they will fork over for a new chair, but as long as your desk still functions as a desk, you don’t get a new one. Also, no desk is broken, no matter how broken it is. Held up by bricks? not broken, taped together? not broken, drawers won’t open? not broken . If whatever is wrong with it can be corrected, it is not broken, so the desk lives on and on and on, spreading its brand of misery where ever it goes and to whomever has to call it theirs.

Now my problem is as I make out my labels, is what do I label? Anything? Everything? Am I going to look like a smart ass if I label my phone? Hand set only or phone body If so, which parts? And how about my label machine? And what of my tape dispenser? The stapler? How about my cat food containers? And if I do label everything in my sight and I do come off like a smart ass, do I care if the prisoners think I’m a smart ass?

Every time I pack all this stuff, I have to unpack it ten minutes later because I suddenly need whatever it was. There are binders that sit on my shelf for months and so in the spirit of doing as I am told, I pack them. I never use them, so I pack them up and then I need them. if it goes into a box, I'm going to need it 10 minutes later. Lather, wash, repeat.