I'm Dreading Packing Up My Office

Picture this, you're not the most organized person in the world and you just spent the last 5 years accumulating thousands upon thousands of pages of articles, manuscripts, handouts from meetings, etc...

Now, you have to move. You have to organize these thousands of pages, put them in boxes, and then transport them home so that the movers can do their moving thing.

This is a not so veiled reference to my current state of affairs in my office.

I was lucky enough this year to have an office to myself. My office mate for my first four years took a job (ahem...ON TIME...unlike some others we know who will go un-named) and left at the end of last summer. I began this year with a new office mate who, two weeks into the Fall semester, decided to quit the program. He was a new student majoring in Operations and, knowing some new students have some fear and trepidation about joining the program, I decided to ask him if he had any concerns that I could help him with.

He posed the following question to me, "So, does this whole Ph.D. thing require a lot of work?"

To begin, that's absolutely the worst question I've ever heard. If you're entering into this deal wondering about how much work you're going to have to do, that's a bad sign.

I tried to respond in a measured fashion and told him that some months are busier than others. The Spring semester is usually easier than the Fall. Etc....

He went to classes for the first two weeks. Didn't turn in an assignment on time for one of his classes. Expectedly, he got his a$$ chewed for doing so. He then went to the first class where he was assigned gobs of reading, and quit.

Anyway, long story short, I've had the office to myself for almost the entire year. This means I've had room to spread out and haven't had to stay organized so that someone else could share a small space with me. This means my job in the next two weeks is to try to get all my crap together in an organized fashion and move it.

Not going to be fun, I can promise you!!!

What makes it worse is that you never know what is OK to throw away and not to throw away. It's funny that you won't need a certain article or manuscript for YEARS and then one day you'll be doing something and say, "I wrote/read an article on that and think I have it somewhere." This begins the search process which usually results in finding said article. Case in point, you have to keep almost EVERYTHING. Geez.

Wish me luck!

Best,

Pappa