Staples Anyone?

My habit every January is to stop and take a mental inventory of all my "stuff," then turn around and attack it with intentions of straightening up and throwing out for a clean fresh feeling in the new year.

This year I went even further and bought some huge Rubbermaid totes...and some steel sack garbage bags. The first for things to keep, the latter for JUNK, such as I define it. That's where the trouble begins.

In theory, I am poised and ready to:

1. Clean out anything I haven't put to good use in the last five years, aka JUNK, and

2. Store the leftover so-called items of value in my spanking new Tote containers.

My office is despicable. Books everywhere, stacks of papers! It boasts a full inventory of miscellany like paper clips, pens, and staples. As a matter of fact, I got ten boxes of 5,000 staples each when a store went out of business years ago. I've been holding onto them for a decade. I was thrilled to get the staples, but I'll have to leave them to my descendents because I'll certainly never use 50,000 in this lifetime.

Many of the items I haven't been able to part with in clean-ups past are at this point in time, 20, even 30 years old. Is this a sickness? What does anybody need with pencils from 1980? Perhaps paper that is yellow around the edges deserves a funeral, right? And what about that dusty ruler from grade school? An address book with dead people's phone numbers...who needs that?

I'm hoping I can be firm in my efforts to throw away what isn't useful. It's going to be tough because I am a pack rat. We'll see. Maybe you can help. If you need some staples, give me a call...



Copyright 2005 JO Janoski