I am cleaning out my cube. I retire next week and thought it best to do that now. You never know what you might find in there, and literally, the very last thing you want to do is explain away something embarrassing as they escort you out the door.
Here is what I found:
- Enough Benadryl and Ibuprofin to drop a moose.
- A shoe-box full of floppy disks. Remember the kind of disk that actually flopped?
- One union contract: unread and unreadable.
- Several pounds of pennies. The pop machine takes quarters, dimes and nickels; only my desk drawer takes pennies.
- One employee manual: partially read and utterly indecipherable.
- A long forgotten shelf of manuals from a long forgotten system. I requested they be donated to the Smithsonian – though I doubt the institute is interested in anything that old.
- Cables… miles of them. Printer cables, video cables, ethernet cables and some surprisingly heavy duty power cables. I think I once used these to jump-start a battleship.
- Two overhead bins containing documentation. Total weight: several hundred pounds. Total cost to produce: several hundred thousand dollars. Number of times referenced: Zero. How do I know that no one read them? I taped a $20 bill to the Table of Contents, along with a note promising another $20 bill to the holder of the note. The bill is still there. (If you are my replacement and reading this post, lunch is on me).
- A blizzard of yellow Post-it notes pasted helter-skelter to my computer monitor. It’s where all my ultra-secret passwords are kept.
- An old security badge with a picture of a much thinner me. (So that is where that thing went! I spent two days convincing security that I lost it – which I suppose I did.)
- A large suitcase. I have no idea how it got there. It is not mine but you never know what you will find once you move a small mountain of manuals and documentation binders.
- The carcass of a long dead mouse. The mystery of what stuck up the office six years ago is now solved.
NOTE: I will be out of the country and off the grid for much of September, so stop back in a few weeks.
Almost Iowa 
Time to update your desk to the kind that “gives” you money each time you open the drawer. Those are kind of pricey and come to think of it… difficult to come by… Besides, you’d waste your life away constantly opening and slamming the drawer…you’d never live life. (almost as addicting as Candy Crush) So scratch that idea.
It is the lot of any techie to collect cables. And good ol’ PS/2 mice. And serial modems.
http://www.xkcd.com/1406/
Have a good holiday, Greg.
You mean they are sending you out of the country? Sounds like you now know the reason for the suitcase and the mouse is for a snack on your way to Outer Mongolia?
Don, I think they’re sending him there because the mouse is ‘sticking’ with them.
“The mystery of what stuck up the office…”
Love that line. I’ll bet your comrades will be sad to see you go, but I want to hear what you find tomorrow. Especially anything sticking up the office. 🙂
Initially I thought you were talking of my car – a Nissan Cube. Thankfully I read on. When we sold our business a few years back and gave up work I discovered so much shit it was unbelievable. More floppy discs than you could shake the proverbial stick at if the truth be told.
This is hysterically funny. And sad in a way. Especially the part about the tons of expensively produced documentation that was never utilized.
I think cubes hold much the same items. You never want to throw anything away, and it is hard to trust the post – it notes all the time to get into your files. I haven’t seen a floppy disk in ages, but my wire file could circle the globe a few times.
I hope my cube is the only one that contains the mummified remains of a mouse.
Sure, you had that all in your cubicle. I haave worked in one of one of those shoeboxes.
You did give us good laugh.
I am only half done. Who knows what I will find this afternoon.
no more bodies! I will not look good on the resume!
I disagree, Maggie. I think you’d look great on anyone’s resume.
DAMN! typo! typo! IT will not look good on the resume!
Heh, heh.