Office Girl

The Solipsister has taken a job. An office-y office job. The kind where everything around you is a shade of beige. Where you ride elevators and nod to security guards. Where some nice person or other has often baked banana bread for the department. The kind of job where you should always have a cardigan handy because the building is cool and all you do it sit at a desk and type. And check your email every four minutes. And blog. Because you can only go to the bathroom so many times, and there's never quite enough to do to keep you interested.

When I was a dewey lass of six, I used to dream that one day I would grow up and have a job in a big office building. I had a romantic Mad Men vision of office life: hale bosses, pert secretaries, rambunctious Christmas parties, endless office supplies.

But don't get me started on office supplies. Staplers. Notebooks. Pens, pencils, paper clips. Now I'm really getting turned on.

Office supply lust. You know what I'm talking about.

At one office job I had, there were giant closets bursting with tape, folders, binders, pads of paper, writing implements of every color and nib. I'd stand in front of them and breathe in their scent. Then I'd gather up as much treasure as I could carry and take it home with me.

But here's how it's gone down. At my last job, one had to go through the judgmental department "admin" (i.e., secretary) to get anything, a pen. Then she would "order" things for you, since one of her many hats was Keeper of the Office Supply Catalogue. It generally took four to six weeks to procure the things you needed. But at this job, the new one, they've all but eliminated the notion of a "supply." What happens, apparently, is that when an employee resigns or is fired, the other employees descend like vultures on his/her cubicle, rifle through his/her drawers and walk away with handfuls of Post-It Notes, etc. This is why you want to be in the loop about things. You want to know who's about to be ejected so you take inventory of their stuff. Then while they're down at HR being canned, you can raid their desks before they can box any of it up and take it home.