Earlier this week I had a phone call.
[Brrring, brrring!]
Me: Good afternoon, Kerensa Tiggywinkle
Caller: Yes.
Me: Can I help you?
Caller: Who are you?
Me: This is Kerensa Tiggywinkle of Tiggywinkle Translations
Caller: I have a client who wants to stay with you.
Me: [Puzzled] Ahem, I’m afraid I don’t offer that service, I’m a translator.
Caller: You’re not a hotel?
Me: No, I’m a translator.
[Click.Brrrrrrrr.]
Harrumph. She might have apologised for interrupting my high level assignment concerning Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Not a translation - I was in the middle of searching for some paperwork. This paperwork had been sitting on the bookshelf next to my desk for months. But it had disappeared. I searched high, I searched low. I looked behind the bookcase, I looked between the dictionaries, I pulled the drawer out of the filing cabinet to see if the papers had somehow got stuck in between/under/behind files (and then couldn’t get the drawer back in again). I even went into the spare room and dragged everything out of Scary Cupboard in the vain hope that I’d shoved the papers in there when doing some emergency clearing up before Christmas (although couldn’t really work out why I would have done so when nobody comes into my office anyway - apart from me, of course). Nothing, Nichts, Nada.
I was foxed. I gave up, had a cup of the stuff that cheers - and decided to try and manage without the papers. I opened my tax file, riffled through it and ….. ta-daa! found the “missing” papers. I must have bunged filed them in there in an extraordinary fit of tidiness one day.
Note to self 1: Be more organised and then believe that you are.
Note to self 2: Steel filing drawers can gash your leg quite hurtily if you trip over them and your leg may well throb all night and the hurtiness may be present in your dreams.
Anyone know how to get steel filing drawers back into the cabinet? There’s a sort of clicky sticky out thing which is in the way….
Cabinets of any sort can be dangerous. I was attacked by a map cabinet yesterday. I have a hole in my finger to show for it.
I find that getting any drawers back into cabinets can be frustrating. I generally ask help from somebody else and ‘help’ while they struggle to get it back in……..
Dishwasher doors have a very bad habit of attacking shins. They often wait till a person is just in the way of one of their sharp corners to attack. Like your cabinet, their injuries hurt very badly for their size and often leave a nasty bruise on shin.
You have to line the runners up and press down on the “clicky things” in order to move them along.
Alternatively, kick them, swear loudly (preferably in many different languages) and stomp away in a huff.
I spent a good hour yesterday looking for some very important certificates I need to mail to my diocese, before discovering I had filed them in my filing cabinet under ‘diocese’. I was really quite surprised, having automatically excluded that as a sensible place to look.
Thanks T&E. I think I shall have to resort to part 2 of your suggestion as I’ve tried part 1 and it hasn’t worked.
Everyone else: it seems that cabinets and machines are out to get us… either by attacking us or hiding papers in places that are too plainly obvious as appropriate locations to bother looking in.
You don’t want to try Rosamundi’s “help me, save me, be my hero” vibes?
