Photo: The junk drawer (after), by Bob Wilson
The small stuff autumn clean-up starts with a simple search of the junk drawer for a missing filing cabinet key. I recently shifted my office downstairs and in the shifting, all the things which were in places known to recent memory have been displaced. But it gives me a good chance to clear out what we call ‘the drawer of drawers’ – a small, deep drawer in which we throw stuff which has no particular home.
The first item in the junk drawer is an electronic button in a plastic pouch. I don’t remember what it is until squeezing it. A tune immediately begins to play, ‘Love Me Tender’, the A and B parts, faintly, reedily and slightly flat. Ah yes, that would be the satin sleep shorts from Valentine’s Day 1990-something. I surmise the idea was that one’s lover slides their hand inside the waistband (into which the button is sewn). You get the picture?
“Do you want to keep this?” I ask She Who Must Always Be Consulted.
“Aw sweet – I remember that…chuck it!”
The next items in the junk drawer are various jeweller’s screwdrivers, Allen keys and plugs you put in hardboard walls when you want to hang a picture. Then there are plastic bags full of assorted screws, nails and other wall attachments.
There are many batteries of various sizes. I set them aside to later test with the battery tester which must be in some other drawer.
Did I mention Blu-Tack? There is quite a bit of that, given our habit of posting music promo flyers all over town. I’m consolidating it into one packet clearly labelled Blu-Tack. You can see how insidiously a brand name worms its way into the language.
There are small padlocks (3) and padlock keys (7), none of which fit any padlock I can find thus far. There are 17 other keys which do not appear to have a match anywhere in the house. The old Camry key goes back quite a few vehicles. There are six plastic dimmer switch caps which became redundant last time the electrician was here.
“Do we really need to keep those?” I ask SWMABC (derisive snort).
At the bottom of the (empty) junk drawer, a tiny cockroach scrambles its way to liberty. I get the vacuum out and hoover up the cockroach grit in the bottom of the drawer. The remaining contents sit on the kitchen table awaiting re-distribution or disposal.
There’s a birthday candle, (5), which causes puzzlement until I realise there was also once a 6, which probably got thrown out after my landmark birthday. There’s a GetUp Action for Australia sticker which I just now stuck on my choir folder. There’s a Maleny Music Festival 2015 volunteer’s badge, a reminder to sign up for this year’s festival starting Friday 31st of August (and score points for being a volunteer promoter).
There’s a ball of green twine (with a strip of Blu-Tack attached), an eraser, a Niagara Falls keyring and a recipe label for Palm Street Choko Chutney. There are also quite a few small butterfly spring clips.
“Most of this shit belongs in the office,” I yell down the hall.
“There’s too much shit in the office drawers already,” comes the rejoinder. “And don’t say shit in your column.”
Motivated, I take some Bank of Queensland coin bags and separate pins, nails, screws and ‘other fasteners’ then stow them in the shed.
Will get around to that one day too, I mutter, soto voce.
So then I get stuck into the office desk drawer. There’s two paper knives (never use them), several magnifying glasses (useful), two boxes of rubber bands and lots of address labels I can’t use anymore because, as I wrote in this blog last April, I stopped paying for a private mail box.
Having drawn a blank in both drawers, I rummage through the three-drawer plastic storage container on my desk, one of which is full of USB drives, each helpfully labelled with a key tag. Oh, yes, and one of these tags is attached to the missing filing cabinet key! ‘Incroyable’ as the French would so foppishly say.
The drawer or box full of USB drives is the scourge of 21st century hoarders. Someone gives you one – “Oh you have to watch (bootlegged series)” and of course it is never returned. I still have my first USB drive, 256MB capacity (it cost $125). But if I tell you that you’ll think I’m a hoarder.
There’s a rarely-used Telstra internet dongle in this drawer, which gives me an angry hot flush when I think about Telstra’s plummeting share price, at $3.10 the lowest point since October 2011.
On Sunday I got onto Telstra’s ‘customer’ chat room to ask why it was that Telstra’s NRL app is charging data to my phone when it is supposed to be free. Incredibly, the customer service consultant told me her remit was for billing inquiries only so she’d have to transfer me to someone else. You know the story. I ended up on the ‘Crowd forum’, which is Telstra’s way of getting customers to solve their own irritating issues. A retired Telstra avatar suggested that perhaps I had not fully completed the installation process which links the NRL.com Live Pass to my mobile phone (very common, if you have the same issue – I could have told you that. Ed).
I know from reader research that 67% of you have no interest at all in rugby league, but I just want to say this one thing.
I remember when a TV reporter asked former Broncos captain Corey Parker what the Brisbane Broncos had to do to beat the Storm.
“Score more points,” was Corey’s laconic reply. He’s now a commentator with Fox Sports.
Miraculously, it seems, I feel freer and less anxious since (a) getting those unrelated issues off my chest and (b) completing the junk drawer declutter exercise.
But as happens with hoarders, the Love Me Tender button now sits on the office window sill, along with a strip of black and white negatives of uncertain provenance, a wooden frog with a fishing pole, a rabbit with one leg, a dumb-looking frog, a groovy ceramic frog with a dobro, a small concrete rabbit, a small pottery elephant, a pink piggybank, a faded postcard from Montreal, a weather station that needs a new battery and a lovely photo of SWMABC looking sweet and harmless. (Just goes to prove photos don’t always tell the truth. Ed)
The winning post
There is one more item on the window sill – a chrome-plated star picket section, ‘The Winning Post’ (pictured left). It was a souvenir from the late George Stratigos, one of the few people in the world to ever sue BHP and win. I wrote (several) news stories in the 1980s about how it took Queensland Wire Industries six years to win a Trade Practices case over BHP’s refusal to sell Y-bar to QWI, which would allow it to make star pickets, thereby competing with a BHP subsidiary. After the High Court ruling, George had a batch of ‘Winning Posts’ cast and gave them to away to remind people how sometimes the little guy can win.
Call me sentimental, but I’m hanging on to the Winning Post, tarnished as it is by age and neglect. Like life itself, even.
FOMM back pages:
and another