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I Know It's Here, Somewhere
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12359 |
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LIFE
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| Issue
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1 / 1987 |
1,230 Words |
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Harold Rosenthal
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If the time ever comes when someone, claiming to be a member of the human species, decides it's imperative that the button be pressed that will convert us all into dancing motes in the filtered sunshine, one thing will be certain: It will be done from a desk. If the gleaming red finger-rest isn't planted on the desk in readiness, it'll be brought in by some lackey for the tender ministrations of the man, woman, or whatever charged with the awesome task of conveying us to that happy land where there are no further carrying charges, tax reforms, or TV laff-tracks.
He will set it down in front as a final photo opportunity. That's because practically every historic move in the last ten centuries has had its genesis at a desk. That goes for the Declaration of Independence written by one Thomas Jefferson in an upstairs room in a Philadelphia boarding house on hot, airless June without benefit of air-conditioning. On a desk.
You'd think that given the importance of desks people would have learned how to manage them for maximum efficiency. Absolutely not. The last U.S. Geodetic Survey indicated 67 percent of the nation maintains (nay, wallows in) that lovable condition known as the "dirty-desk," which has nothing to do with the condition of their underclothing or spots on a cravat.
It refers to the glaring organized disorder. For God's sake, who told you to straighten up my desk? It'll take me a week to find that real-estate tax receipt. Did you know I paid it in case because the checking account was overdrawn?
Dirty desks come in various styles, depending on whether the desk is "free-standing" (meaning it isn't backed against a wall, which doubles your capacity for stacking things), whether it is encumbered by a phone to two, and whether you need a clock to tell you the time of day. Some prize-winning dirty desks are so cleverly stacked that the "vital" material shuts out the daylight, requiring you to work by lamp no matter what the hour. Lamps, themselves, never adorn a dirty desk proper. They extend on arms from a nearby wall or shine down from the ceiling.
No one is born a dirty-desker. You start, probably at a tender age, when you first place a kindergarten drawing on your daddy's desk for post-supper examination and approval. He burps a few times, falls asleep, and in the morning he throws away your Gauguin.
This produces a delayed tantrum on your part, and the next time you bring one home he treats in pretty much the same way except he doesn't throw it away. It sits on his desk a few days so you get the idea that is where it has always belonged, along with the other detritus of daily living.
So is burn the "put it on the desk" syndrome, to be compounded through your adolescence, your active working years, and ultimately into your senescence. At the end, you are shuffling around three-year-old copies of Scientific American looking for your heart pills, your kidney pills, and so forth, - somewhere underneath, of course.
Most dirty-deskers learn to leave a spot on the desk where they can work. The size of an 8 ½ x11 inch letterhead will
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