How One Thing Leads to Another

When I was in college I volunteered from time to time to participate in psych experiments. They always seemed to involve solving a problem which required a group solution but only you could only talk to one person at a time. For some reason I was reminded of that as I attempted to reorganize our shared office space

It's not that it's so disorganized, or even that we have trouble sharing the space. It was more like that seems to be the room where old furniture goes to die, and it was beginning to look a bit like a warehouse.

After sitting in the chair with a cup of coffee contemplating the scene, I decided I wanted to swap the places of two of the desks, one of which has a large  bookshelf sitting on top of it. The best place to begin seemed to begin by clearing all the shelves. But where to put the stuff? once the two desks were swapped, the shelves, which are actually a set of boxes would go back where they were on top of a different desk.

I couldn't put everything on top of OilMan's desk because he uses it. I didn't want to put everything on the floor because it is a pain (literally) to pick it all up again. OilMan came up with the solution ofsetting up a folding table on which to put everything. Then he set about unscrewing all the boxes from each other so that we could move them. I thought maybe we could just somehow slide them from one surface to the other without dismantling them, but all we managed to do on that attempt was tip out the adjustable shelves onto our heads and knock a picture off the wall.

Unscrewing the boxes presented another problem...finding a screwdriver short enough to fit inside the box. When OilMan went outside to look for one, the knob to the tool shed fell off and he couldn't open the door. It took him an hour to dismantle the door so he could get inside to get a screwdriver. He can just be seen outside the window in my picture hammering away on the door.

One of the desks, which can be seen under the window in the picture, is modular, so the top lifts off the two cabinets which act as a base. But the top weighs a ton and has a cubby which had a pair of scissors concealed in the back of it. When we tilted it up to lift it off the base, the scissors fell out onto the table smashing the picture previously knocked off the wall   and knocking over a pile of books.

And so it went on. We could only move one thing at a time yet everything had to be changed. We finally swapped the desk under the window for the one holding the bookcase. The bookcase is a series of boxes now randomly piled to one side of the room, all the adjustable shelves leaning against the wall. 

I'm not really sure I like this solution any better, but it's not as if I can stand back and have a look since there is a table full of stuff in the middle of the room, so there it will all remain until tomorrow when I try to put everything back together. I used to have a picture of the arrangement of the boxes and what was in each one, but I don't seem to be able to find it....

It was definitely a psych experiment requiring pretty careful communication between OilMan and me lest we wreak any more havoc. And even though he didn't see the point, OilMan was pretty patient about helping me, in spite of the fact he didn’t really see the point. I wasn't sure I saw the point either....