Messy office....you know its too messy when....

you cannot find an article that you need, and you know its somewhere within about a five foot radius of where you are sitting, but there are so many piles of articles that its just easier to reprint it!

... when you pick up your library card on you desk, only to have it not work when you get to the library. Turns out it's the one you cancelled several months ago after looking high and low. Time to look for the the valid one... amongst the office detritus

...when you go and buy another USB pen because you have lost 'it' again. Then you shift a few books and find it...again!

When you keep printing off 'lost' articles that turn up soon after complete with repeated annotations....

And what happens to all my decent pens? There must be a pen goblin in my house.

....You lose the cat, only to find she's been buried alive by papers, submitted to her fate and has fallen asleep.

My cats drive me crazy when I'm working. There's no peace from about 2 hours before they get fed - scratching on my (open) door, jumping on my papers, sitting on my keyboard....

I remember doing my JD ( professional doctorate law degree) and the adventures of trying to study with pets. My housemate had two ( and sometimes more) cats ( she was forever rescuing strays). The cats would come and sit on my book so I could not turn a page, shove things off my bed ( this was in the days when computers were still run by people manipulating paper cups around a big motherboard in a huge room--so I did not have one...no one did), etc...anything to be a nuisance whilst people tried to study.

I had dogs, one ( and sometimes a stray one that was temporarily housed---as I was always rescuing them...). I will NEVER forget walking into my bedroom to see my dog take a mouthful of pages from one of my text books, throw them in the air, and watch them fall like snow flakes around him. The young stray puppy occupant of the house was watching, wagging his tail really hard at the fall of paper. Then my dog grabbed another mouthful of pages from the book and repeated this. I was dumbstruck. Fortunately I was able to rescue the book mostly intact--minus most of the index, but who needs those, and a literally dog eared back cover.

I had a wee tidy up around Bleak Towers this morning--how messy can a single room become?? especially when you own nothing---but somehow it still managed to be! I found another article I had been searching for, though how it made its way to Bleak Towers is a mystery.

when you dig through stacks of articles, can't find the one you need even though you had it 10 minutes ago, print off a copy again, somehow then as its printing find the missing one.....its time to go home!

Its when papers are at 45degrees, occupy every flat surface, you sometimes have to balance your computer on top of a pile of books because all space is occupied, the cat manages to squeeze in between two piles of papers, and then wiggles and wiggles to get comfy and sends both piles flying - or - as I found at work today, you know there is a piece of paper on the desk with some vital info on it and you can't find it, you search through all the odd bits of paper several times, and even go to search somewhere else even though you know it is on the desk, and then it just appears in the pile on the desk, out of the blue - how does that happen then???? On the other hand I can't work in a really tidy place...well that is my excuse anyway and I'm sticking to it too.