Office Detritus

I'm rapidly reaching the bottom of the piles that are my office, and finding the odd effluvia of 13 years here (although only about three years since my last office move). I've boxed up most of my books and files that I want to keep, and schlepped many of them home to fill up my apartment, where they will await movers. I'm in the process of attempting to return books I've borrowed. I've been trying to pass off supplies, like a couple of dozen half-empty pads of paper (including one pad of graph paper, which I vaguely recall picking up for an algebra class when I first taught as a GTA about 12 years ago), and a blue-jillion blank note cards in different sizes. (These are the weird little supplies you end up with as a teacher. I already just gave up and threw out most of the red pens I found. And yes, "blue-jillion" is a technical mathematical term for "butt-load".)

So now the desks are starting to appear again (I told you already I'm a piler), and I can see the bits of paper, paper clips, rubber bands, stray markers and pens that escaped my earlier sweeps (how many markers did I own?), a prescription bottle which turned out to have been re-purposed for holding ibuprofen, an actual ibuprofen bottle (is this saying something about my job?), a bottle of Rolaids (no comment), some possibly blank CDs, two spoons (I'm grateful I didn't find more cutlery than that, really), a microwavable cup of soup that languished here since it's more fun to go get lunch with someone out, computer cables, a manual for a cheap calculator I got to loan out for students at tests, staples, a humidifier I brought when my sinuses were killing me, batteries, and probably a ton of other junk.

And paper. I have stacks and stacks of paper sitting on my floor right now, waiting to get taken down to a dumpster: notes that are too scattered to be worth rescuing, extra handouts I was keeping "in case", copies of old notes packs, the used halves of all those pads of paper, phone books, old student papers ("And if you look to your left, you'll see opscan mountain..."), overheads, a huge stack of evaluations I decided I didn't need to keep anymore (I have the yearly summaries, and I kept the ones from the past year or so which had any comments), magazines I didn't read, envelopes, and probably something valuable and important which I didn't notice got tossed into the pile.