And how does their mess affect you?
(getting bite bit by a rat)
Prior to retiring, I kept both the messiest desk and the messiest office of any set of coworkers I’ve ever known. This was one of those situations where someone could ask me for any document on any day and about 90 to 95% percent of the time, I could produce it immediately. I knew exactly where everything was, yet if anyone else ever tried to search for something, it was a futile effort. Few even tried. It looked like what we used to call in the Marine Corps, that “a paper grenade had been tossed in there”.
Rewind the clock or turn back the calendar pages to when I was about six years old, I noticed that at the dining table, my younger brother (13 months my junior) always left a veritable ring of spilled food around his plate when he ate. It didn’t matter what the meal was, what kind of food, it seemed to me that half his servings fed the table more than they fed his face. It was inconceivable to my young mind how he could make such a mess, especially because I, as his elder and example, never did it. In fact, out of four siblings at that time, he being the youngest, he was the only one who was a sloppy eater. Alas, even being over a year of advanced age beyond him, I had no power nor authority, because our mother maintained a strict policy that none of us could parent or boss another. Why she herself never took the same umbrage that I took also escaped my realm of comprehension, because she was a strict disciplinarian in the strictest definitions of the phrase. At the end of each meal, his discards were wiped up and thrown in the rubbish, yet another capital offense in our household, yet overlooked for some odd and never disclosed reason in obvious and decidedly unfair preferential treatment bestowed upon that vile and undeserving knave. His slovenly habit, unchecked in childhood, continued for at least a decade thereafter.
[Caveat: as far as the office is concerned, I never had a desk job while in the Corps, where such messiness never would have been allowed.]
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