Table Mining

misleading photo to lure you into reading this post

    What is the difference between unorganized and disorganized?  I looked it up. Unorganized means you have never been organized.  Disorganized means you once were organized, but no longer are.  And so my tale of woe begins.  One male person, with whom I am married, let’s call him -hmm- Bruce, once was organized.  So much so, his shirts hung in the closet, sectioned off by color and style and their  fronts all faced left.  It was a thing over which I often teased him. The teasing has stopped.
     I heard a long time ago that the only permanent thing in life is change.  And so it is with regard to Bruce’s organization. Shall we focus on papers? Yes, let's do! His organization of papers is, pretty much, non-existent.  Don’t get me wrong, he pays the bills on time and gets to his board meetings on the correct date.  It’s just that his papers are in scattered piles on my dining room table.  On second thought, I can’t really call them piles.  It’s more like a random order of irregular stacks.   Can anyone explain why he can tell me where my shoes are, but he can’t find any of his own stuff? Worse yet, he blames it on me.  Example:  “Where is the folded paper with those phone numbers on it?  I know YOU moved it.”  Of course, I didn’t move it.  I have enough of my own junk to not covet any of his.
     So currently, we are at the stage I refer to as table mining.  This is the condition where there is so much of his--his crapola, that’s a technical term, on my table, it is threatening my good will and making me feel much less gracious than one should. In order for us to have dinner at the table, I must shovel the papers, phone book, notebook, magazines, cell phone, watch, snail mail, eye patch, folders, whatever, into a bag only to have him dump it back on the table the next morning, when he’s one again open for business.

     It’s not as if he has no area of his own on which to put his stuff.  Why, I personally have dusted a 10" x 11" space on the top of the marble-topped antique dresser in the bedroom, exclusively for his use.
     It seems the only solution to my dilemma, definitely my dilemma, since he has no issue with the cluttered table like I do, is to have him try desk mining next.  Once his rolltop desk in our home office is cleared and he unearths  the abacus*, slider-ruler and crank telephone buried there, making room, my hope is he will transfer his dining table piles to said desk.  I have tried nagging and tears to make this happen.  So far, only negative results.  Withholding the TV clicker is next, me thinks…     

 

*For anyone unsure, an abacus is an old-timey Chinese calculator. You manually move beads up and down as you count.