Rediscovering the
corner is more apt.
That office corner to my left is gone. Can’t
reach in there any longer. And that office corner to my right is something I
rediscovered on an expedition to…
Well, an expedition to the far corners of
the office.
I took a non-machete to nothing in
particular. Instead of hacking and slashing at an item, I secured and fixed a
thing instead.
The upshot of buying a new computer is still
with me. (To the extent that I had to ferret around in Micromanaged Word for settings I was forced to wrestle with, not
two minutes before penning this blog.)
(Yes, the pen settings.)
*
Bringing my printer
to life and booting it out of the room gave me space. But did that give me
space? I went all sumo on a shaky
piece of storage and slapped it into that new space. But I wasn’t happy with
it. So I went in and looked at it again.
It suffered under another task. This storage
unit groaned under a pile of books in another location. The books stayed where
they were, and only the storage staggered along to its latest home. I decided
that the unit wouldn’t face the same load as before…
There appeared to be warping that the
construction would never recover from. In this, I was mistaken. When I took a
second look at the joints, I saw one wasn’t in there properly. And that led to
the shaky look and the warping that wasn’t warping at all.
*
And so. I fixed
that. In fixing that, I realised I could tighten everything up and slide the
shelving about a hand’s-width to the left. Structural integrity renewed, I’d
make better use of the shelving. With the piece shoved left, I buttressed it
against ALL THE THINGS THERE. And…
The chain-reaction swept in. I moved the
next shelf unit left and I moved the final shelf unit left…rediscovering the
far corner of the room. Out came the measure. Could I fit equipment in there?
Answer. Just barely.
Curiously, uncovering the corner only to
stuff it with material almost immediately…didn’t cover the corner up again. I
can see it, still. It’s clearly over there. What sorcery is this?
*
It is the sorcery of
buying a new machine and knowing that there’s no such thing as instant change.
You don’t use this routine or that function for a week at a time, and suddenly
it is very important and broken thanks to awkward settings.
The same applies to physically moving items
around in the wake of a new tech upgrade. You gain space, but don’t want to use
the shelf there. It is a bit off. Until you realise the bloody obvious and fix
the problem. And then, you gain the span of a hand in free space on top of the
free space you rescued from obscurity.
I am done moving this office around.
Which means I know that I am far from done
moving this office around. There’s more to do. I will wave farewell to the far
corner I’ve uncovered. It must vanish behind camouflage, into the darkness once
more. But not today.
First, I’ll move the printer/scanner that’s
now just a scanner. I wish it had wireless connections. Then I’d shove it into
another room. I COULD shove it into another room by drilling a hole in the wall
and extending two wires a few inches, for the scanner is WAAAAAAAAAAY over
there anyway.
But I like to see what I am scanning and I
like to correct the scanned item’s position without having to walk all the way
to Africa and back. It feels like a long walk
to the printer, already elsewhere.
*
Surprisingly, this
time around, I’m not moving stuff that’s terribly heavy. Oh, a few items
gathered in one place add up to a hefty pile or two. But normally, abnormally,
I unload an entire bookcase teetering under the force of its own gravitational
field, move the piles of books out of the bookcase’s path, haul the case to a
new home, and then hire a fleet of starships to pick scattered piles of books
out of the floor.
Not off the floor. Out of the floor.
And this time
around, well. It’s different. Usually I feel this is the last time I am
arranging or refitting part of the office, and I move MOUNTAINS to get that done.
That’s standard routine, every bloody time.
Here, though, I know I’ll move stuff again.
I am certain of that. But I’m barely moving a thing worthy of strain.
Could that be thanks to the moving I did
before? Sweeping a whole load of bookshelves and cases straight out of here? That
was the last time I’d ever do that, naturally.
I’m curious. Now that I believe I am going
to move things again, will I ever move things again? Is this the secret I’ve
overlooked, these many times? Tell yourself this is the last time, lie to
yourself, and move an elephant’s weight in books.
But accept that you’ll move stuff again
soon, and. You lift all the light stuff? Perhaps never to move anything again?
I think it unlikely. We’ll see. I haven’t reduced my chances of being killed by
a falling bookcase. No. Instead, I merely redistributed the chances around
different rooms.
*
Different rooms with
the same old books in them. As I’ve noted somewhere in a dusty blog, a few of
those books are very old indeed. Older than me, older than you, far older than
this house. I think we’re playing at Back
to the Future here and imagining swamp then where houses stand now, when a
few of those books came into print.
Given that a few of them are by Dickens,
they are books still in print today.
Will the shelves themselves stand up to the test of time?
I had to gut a small bookcase recently. Not
a design I like. And I went at it with hammer and nail, trying hard not to
batter my thumbs to shit. I didn’t batter my thumbs to shit. But I found that
in moving this particular bookcase one last time…
It really was one last time. The top shelf
cascaded down onto the middle shelf, and it barely stood the impact. I was
forced to brace the shelves with metal brackets. Wear, tear, too much movement
from one place to another, wounded the shelves.
I toyed with leaving them as they were.
Books piled on the bottom of the unit, shelf just sitting directly on top of
the books, and then the same arrangement again higher up. It would work. But physics
tells me that the whole arrangement could only topple out from behind the
doors, cascading to the floor in a solid crump sounding like a lorry hitting
the house.
Hence…the bracing, and a use for those
brackets.
*
Raises a point. Bookcases
themselves have character. (That case was a character in need of reform.)
There’s the one that looks like the other one, but the top strut comes away
freely in your hand if you forget it’s that one and not the other one.
No, I don’t move either of those cases very
often.
Here’s one to the left of me, with exposed
brackets, like the smile of someone who shows off silver teeth. Perhaps, one
day, I will move that case again and fix the doors back on.
Now I am staring ahead at three narrow
bookcases. I count up three shelves, and all three shelves are level. If we go
up one more, the shelves accommodate different heights of books and the shelves
resemble stairs climbing to the right.
I go up another level and it’s the bookshelf
to the left that’s a little lower, while the other two are now level. And there
are more exposed silver teeth, too.
Bookcases have character. They hold
hardbacks the whole length, or take a break to house a wad of magazines from a
million years ago. Comics, trade paperbacks, and graphic novels live downstairs
from hardbacks, and misfit paperbacks occupy the loft-space of the bookcase’s
structure, living where no other books could squeeze in.
A case to my right matches some of the
levels of bookcases to the left. But we veer into random turf here, as one
shelf holds electrical equipment – and computer gear, at that.
When I bought the new computer, I cleared
out the bottom shelf on the right and made room for a multi-socket extension
that lets me see at a glance that all the right things are switched on. Though,
being this crowded place, the glance has to be stolen from over the keyboard in
front of me.
Typing here, as I’ve typed for a long while
now, I feel settled in the office. But I always feel settled, whichever way I
decide to face. I think about it. Yes…I’ve faced all four points of the compass
when running the office. There isn’t a direction that alienated me.
I wonder if that’s the case for other
writers. You can’t face this way or that. I find the best way to face is a way
that limits the chance of being crushed by a collapsing bookcase. Now, I’ve
reduced…no, redistributed…the danger to the lowest threat-level since records
began. But I don’t really feel any more or less safe.
The office continues being the office, no
matter the layout. I have the umpteenth chair, the umpteenth keyboard and
mouse, and way beyond the umpteenth empty coffee cup not too far from my elbow.
How far from my elbow? Far enough that it won’t be knocked over by my elbow.
There’s a precise mathematical formula for that, and it involves making all
your coffee mistakes early.
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