[rescue] OT: Clutter???

[Tim H.]

On Sat, 3 Aug 2002 22:01:40 -0500
lesliec at theplanet.com (Leslie Connally) wrote:

> Question.. any packrats on this list? Do you come by your packratness
> honestly? was eg (like mine) your father or mother a packrat?.. is
> packratness learned or inheirited?

Those last two questions will be very difficult to correlate, unless a
reasonably large group of people raised apart from their parents can be
found.  

I am messy for convenience, and because of an unfulfilled desire to be
very organized.  Whenever I start cleaning I end up getting to a
miscellaneous storage container (of which I have many) and spend the
time I have available to clean sorting the different sizes and types of
screws, etc. and never return to the big picture.  Which is much
different than my wife, who just throws everything away until the big
picture looks right.  

I am learning to eliminate horizontal surfaces in my own space, because
even a small horizontal area will rapidly become a large stack.  I can
get 2 or three feet high on top of a Sun IPX, and of course the pile is
larger than the area of the surface, so I do have occasional landslides.
 

I used to work with a guy who had not seen 2 of the 4 computers in his
cube for over a year.  I always wondered how he didn't start a fire. He
had a couple DEC boxes of some sort so burried in his cube that you
really couldn't see them.  He also had pulled out the top drawers of his
storage units, and built up from there, which meant that the stuff in
the bottom drawers had not been seen for periods approaching a year.  I
am not as bad as that, but it isn't pretty.  This is why I have never
posted pictures of my computer room.

Tim