Some coffee with that?

My office is a mess. This is not a shock to anyone who knows me.

I can find stuff, most of the time, on my desk. Every three months or so, I clean-up my office and find all the stuff I was sure I threw out before. My office at home looks about the same as when I had an office in the “working” period of my life.

I worked most of my career with engineers and cost folks. Many of these people are neater than me; I say that as a point of interest, more so than a good thing vs. bad thing.

I have a good friend in Montana who once told me, that a four year degree means he knows “a lot about one thing.” And over the course of time, he didn’t use this knowledge, after being hired for the knowledge he had.

We had this dude we worked with who was the polar opposite of me when it came to neatness. Actually, probably even more than the neatness difference…

You could eat off this guy’s desk. I have been in museums and hospitals that paled in comparison.

He actually kept his files in file cabinets!! I personally chose to use the floor of my office. One time when I was working late, the janitor asked if she could speak to me.

She was concerned that even a light cleaning of my office was next to impossible. She was afraid that even walking into the office would disturb my system of filing.

So anyways… Mr. Neat clearly was light years ahead of me in filing and the use of Windex.

It was announced at our staff meeting that Mr. Clean was being transferred to Los Angeles and would be leaving in four weeks. So of course something needed to be done to keep our memory alive in his mind.

Chocolate cream pie…

We had, on occasion, an assortment of foods brought in for meetings. Not to say it was a great deal of food, but after I retired I lost about 25 pounds.

So following one of these meetings, my friend, Ron, and I noticed some chocolate cream pie leftover. Ron and I were never very good at just letting things be.

We took a slice of the mouthwatering pie and placed it into a Ziploc bag. We then, of course, proceeded down to Mr. Clean’s office. We went to his files, found an empty folder. We then made a sticker for the folder name and marked it as, “Pie (chocolate cream)”.
We then placed it in its ‘proper place’ in the file cabinet. (Ron had to show me how to do that, since I kept coffee cups and baseball caps in mine.) We then left the area.

We waited and waited, yet no type of response.

We would slip down to the office and check to see if the pie was in fact still there. It was, still in its folder and Ziploc bag. However, it was beginning to look less and less than the delicious piece of dessert it had started out as. I believe the term would be ‘science experiment’. At one point, I think everyone in the building knew about the pie, with the exception of the owner of the pie-file.

So, here we are at the day of Mr. Clean’s departure. We of course bring in food to say ‘farewell’. During the luncheon, Ron and I slip down to Mr. Clean’s office and notice the packing boxes everywhere. Surely, the “pie is out of the bag” so to speak.

We glance in the now, empty filing cabinet. We look in the garbage can, no pie.

We return to the luncheon, skip the pie selection and bid farewell to our departing workmate. He promises to call us and keep us up on how things are going in the ‘big city.’

Months go by and the pie is forgotten. We talk with Mr. Clean and all is well.

One day, the phone rings. It is our friend in LA and he has just discovered something “too gross to believe” in his new filing cabinet.

“Pie, you say? Yep, that’s pretty weird alright.”