I just spent the morning hauling out my craphole dungeon of an office. Why do we, as humans, feel the need to keep every piece of crap that we come across? You don't see this behavior in nature. Animals hoard food in order to make it through the winter, birds collect junk to build their nests. Why do humans collect?
My office has become the joke of the family. I guess its because I am constantly telling the husband and the children to pick up after themselves. Then they look in my office and then look at me with that you-are-a-hippocrit look in their eyes. My answer to the look is that I'm the mother and the queen and just do as you are told. Of course, that works with the kids, not so much with the husband. We won't even start to discuss the basement and the garage...those are areas that we have deemed condemned, therefore we do not frequent those places.
I began at one corner of my desk and diligently worked through the mess. I came across magazines from two years ago, junkmail, scraps of paper, old post-it notes, bill statements, dust, debris, dead insects, cob webs, money, and about a hundred USB cables that I have no idea to what they belong. It was the most haunted of all haunted desks. Through the corpses and cobwebs, I did find my paper shredder, which was buried alive under a pile of mail and statements waiting patiently to be turned into paper fodder. After shredding the pile, I had enough confetti to celebrate the end of a world war. I hauled out the file shelf and actually put files on the shelf. I found a slew of old birthday cards, pictures, more damn bill statements, batteries, empty frames, calendars, and a date book from 2006. That can't be good...that may mean that I haven't cleaned since 2006??? Yikes.
Everytime we buy a new electronic device, we not only save the old electronic device that we are replacing, we also save the box that the new device came in. Just in case. Our house is filled with "just in case" crap. We have two old tube computer monitors. You know the ones that weighed about 75 pounds and took up half a block's worth of space. We have three old printers...yes, three. One is staring at me with sad eyes as I sit here and type. It hasn't been used since probably 2007, and it just wants to be euthanized. We have the box the Wii came in, all of the accessory boxes, the Wii Fit box, and the Hitachi T.V. box. We've had these devices for over a year, so I don't think anyone is going to take them back. We have the Super Soaker boxes still from the kids birthdays, and shoeboxes with grown-out shoes in them. We even save the toys that the dog destroyed because maybe they will somehow magically patch themselves and we will be able to give them back to her.
So now I'm sitting in a clean office. I still have the four bags of garbage sitting here. As I sit here, I wonder how long it will actually take me to take those four bags of garbage over to the basement door. Then I wonder how long they will sit in the basement before they make their final journey to the curbside pickup. I'm thinking it will probably be at least another five years before they go to trash heaven.
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