Hoarding

As I mentioned previously, she is a hoarder and pack rat of the first order. We have 17 chairs in our conference room (only eight fit around the table). We have four horizontal file drawers full of computer peripherals and accessories like keyboards, mice, printer cables that are so old you cannot physically plug them into a modern PC. We have six bookshelves lined with PC software that is old enough that the boxes contain floppy disks - and not the small 3.5-inch floppy disks from when I was in college 13 years ago. We have two one-gallon Ziploc freezer bags full of old pens and markers that barely write. A box of cell phone going back 20 years sits in our kitchen area.

The worst and most cluttering object of the hoarding, though, is freebies from conventions, shows, advertising campaigns, and the like. There must be 100 canvas bags with logos of trade shows or companies no one has heard from in the past 10 years. The ultimate story of hoarding came about a year ago when I was trying to throw away some of the mounting mess of detritus from the office.

She had surrendered to the need for more free space in the office. With the rare opportunity to clean house, I had already taken two bags of garbage out when she walked in, surveyed the pile of trash and grabbed a box from the pile destined for the building's Dumpster. The old and faded brown cardboard box had a printed logo that said "Airtouch Cellular" on it and I already knew what was inside - a wooden cheeseboard and cheese knife. The cheeseboard had the Airtouch Cellular logo burned into it. She looked at me and I knew it was on.

"Why are you throwing this away?" she pleaded.
"It's been sitting here for probably 10 years and you have never even opened it. Plus it's a cheeseboard. You wouldn't buy it for 50 cents at the store," I replied.
"No, no, no, we can't throw this away. It's in perfectly good shape."

She looked at her husband - my other boss - who had entered in the midst of her passionate cheeseboard defense, and said "You know, your cousin's wedding is coming up. We could give this to him as his gift."

"It has a logo on it from a company that is so old it no longer exists!" I interjected for his cousin's sake and for all that is good and holy in the world of proper gift-giving.

"We can put a sticker over that. Something that says 'Congratulations' or something," she answered.

Now, this a foodservice item and her plan clearly would unravel upon the cheeseboard's first use by his cousin and I knew this. She was going to use a freebie wooden cheeseboard with a homemade sticker covering up a burned-in corporate advertisement as a wedding gift for a family member! And her husband wasn't stopping her!

But I gave up. I let her have it. You get to a certain point with a person who is crazy where the more you argue, the more you feel you are being pulled down into their quagmire. I stepped away from that argument and continued on with my clean-up.