I’m sitting next to my colleague and listening to him complain profusely about his assigned task for the day: clearing out the
stationery cupboard.
Now, I would offer to take over the job, but it is kind of entertaining watching him get agitated
over it. To be honest, I rather enjoy clearing it out. It’s a bit like Sarina’s magical mysterious
filing cabinet – you never know what you might find in its dark dusty corners.
Unfortunately, despite belonging to a stationery company our cupboard isn't a utopian idyll where each item has a clearly designated space (though my colleague rather wishes it did). It starts off well – uniformly stacked
Post-it notes cosy up next to
boxes of pens and boxes of
windowless envelopes.
Jiffy bags are a little tipsy in their pile but, while wobbly, are still constrained to their own patch of
the shelf. Once, energised by artistic inspiration, I organised cut-flush folders by colour in
magazine files so they looked like a rainbow.
It all sounds neat and tidy, doesn't it? However, after a couple of weeks and multiple rummages by office mates in a rush to find something, our stationery cupboard resembles any other – a lopsided mess. Frustration ensues as someone grabs what they think is a
standard window DL envelope but finds it is actually a
C5 envelope and lacking said window, the
jiffy bags finally give up and topple out all over the floor, and my colleague ends up rather comically gazing around himself at the mountain of
office products that now surrounds him.
The question is – do I continue having a laugh at my colleague’s expense or find something in our furniture range that may help? Items that come in their own boxes, such as
printable labels,
envelopes and boxes of
copier paper generally behave themselves (even if the humans on the stationery hunt don’t).
So I think I will watch him squirm a bit longer, and save the solutions for when it’s my turn. Can’t give away all my secrets...
