The reign of error ends soon. Actually, filling in as interim editor, or “Interim Glorious Leader” as I like to call it, has gone more smoothly than expected.
As I’ve told people in the office, it has not come without cost for we editorial folk. There have been days when an unexpected email or call leaves me distracted to the point where the one-minute task I was working on doesn’t get picked up until I remember what I was doing one hour later.
My desk has suffered the most. I should point out my desk is famously messy under normal circumstances, especially in the days when I covered council, school board and court. You can imagine the paperwork that gathered in what I’ve called my “piling system.”
I posted a photo on Facebook recently in which I had five different notebooks open, stating I was to reporter’s notebooks what Yes’s Rick Wakeman was to keyboards during the 1970s.
Many tease me about the clutter, but the mess works. Most of the time. A couple of weeks back, someone popped in to retrieve a photo chip card they’d dropped off. I knew it was there, but I spent a frantic few minutes trying to excavate the strata of paper spread about my desk. Sure enough, it was there, but I did start to sweat.
That’s the thing: the only time I actually lose stuff is when I clean up. The only person that ever took issue with my piling system was the publisher of a newspaper who shamed me into removing a pile of newspapers on my desk I was using for reference.
For various reasons, I now describe her as the worst person I’ve ever met – and I’ve interviewed murderers. (I took another job after three months, in part because of her.)
My response to this piece of human nastiness now is that mess can be beneficial. A University of Minnesota study a few years back found that while order encourages healthy choices but also conventionality, a bit of mess can produce more creative thinking.
So there. Let me have my mess, and I’ll really try not to lose your chip cards in the meantime. (As an addendum, I did clean up the desk a little last week, so if this column stinks, you know what’s to blame.)
