Trouble in The Office

Favorite Things and Such

Office Supplies. Aren’t they grand? My favorite toy is the heavy-duty stapler that could staple an inch-thick of documents with a single wire. Running second is an old-fashioned pencil sharpener, not the plastic one but the metal type you vise unto the table, because it makes wood-clinched pencils so wonderful to use with their sturdy lead points.

Lately, I discovered that my Office-mates have affinities for office things as well, like Post-its and bull clips. One brand manager was “caught” hoarding a big plastic tub of bull clips; she said she runs out whenever she needs them most. The planner who loved Post-its stuck notes all around the frame of her computer monitor (does that mean she doesn’t get anything done?). Another marketer adored pencils and kept them in a white ceramic mug, like a bouquet of flowers (ala You’ve Got Mail). I guess she only uses one or two for work, the rest is just decoration.

This brings me to the topic of Pencils, very strange creatures. When I was an estimator, I always ran out of pencils. I kept going back to Marni the secretary for a new pair every week. She asked me what I did with them; I said they just kept disappearing and I didn't know where they’ve gone! Curiously, the disappearance of pencils was accompanied by a multiplication of paper clips in my work station. (I only asked once for a box of paper clips, and that was years ago when I first joined marketing, and yet I had enough paper clips to fill two more boxes!)

If you were in my shoes, you’d theorize that Pencils morph into Paper Clips, like, you know, the way caterpillars change into butterflies? I never shared this theory with my co-workers. Not that it was stupid, but I didn’t have enough proof…

To prevent my pencils from disappearing, I stuck thin pieces of sticker paper on them with the words “This Pencil Stolen from (My Name).” Eventually, the culprits voluntarily turned themselves in with the embarrassed “Hey, this is yours” line. They were either brand managers or marketing planners. It seems that whenever they dropped in my cubicle to discuss something, they borrowed my pencils to take down notes, and then absentmindedly took these pencils with them when they returned to their own cubes. Aha! Mystery solved.

(Remarkably, this nicely explains the converse phenomenon I have observed as a marketing planner – that of pencils multiplying.)

But what about the mushrooming paper clips? I haven’t proven it yet, but my current hypothesis is: Paper Clip growth is proportional to the volume of incoming documents received in a day. Estimators get a lot of estimation requests, and these requests have lots of documents held together by paper clips. They're probably the most received by a function on this floor. Brand managers and marketing planners’ paper trail is usually on the outgoing mode; ergo they don’t gather enough paper clips on their side as much as the estimators. This could pretty much justify the brand manager’s obsession with bull clips.

posted by Elyss @ 5:31 PM