No messing around with this desk

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/09/2018 (2873 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Today I’d like to share the shocking, but true story of a slovenly newspaper columnist.

To shield this journalistic icon from public embarrassment, we’ll give him a fictitious name — Doug sounds about right.

Now if Doug was famous for anything, he was famous for having arguably the messiest desk in the entire newspaper industry.

Doug’s unkempt workspace was typically buried under several metric tonnes of old newspapers, discarded food wrappers, out-of-date news releases, faded postcards, empty Styrofoam containers, broken ballpoint pens, soiled napkins and other assorted bric-a-brac collected over years of a glorious, albeit untidy, journalism career.

His desk was frequently subjected to walk-by sneerings from his far-tidier colleagues, whose desks, while not clean enough to eat off of, at least gave the impression of hygienic professionalism, if you catch our drift.

So one day — this was about a month ago — Doug was sitting at his messy desk, trying to think deep thoughts, when his favourite newsroom administrator came over and politely explained that this was the day our hero would have to clean his workspace, because a) it set a really bad example in terms of personal hygiene; and b) it was probably a fire hazard.

Hanging his head in shame, Doug set about the massive clean-up operation, carefully dragging layers of useless crud off his desk and dumping it in a huge blue garbage bin in the nearby hallway.

It took him roughly three hours to get rid of all his treasured rubbish, largely because it is difficult not to sit down and read for a while when you stumble on a 12-year-old newspaper hidden under a pile of toast crumbs and other potentially mouldy debris.

In the end, Doug’s famously messy desk was transformed into a shining example of workplace cleanliness and everyone was proud that this untidy columnist had turned over a new, and much tidier, leaf.

Which is when Doug decided to go away for two weeks of holiday, leaving his squeaky clean desk to fend for itself.

When he returned to work, the reformed slob happily plopped himself down in his workplace cubicle, and immediately discovered that (EEK!) his arms had become essentially glued to his desk, about a third of which was coated in a thick layer of bright-red, extremely sticky goop.

What had happened is that, while Doug was away, a can of strawberry-lime soda pop — one of about half a dozen cans that had been sitting on his desk for 12 years after being sent to him as part of a promotion — had sprung a leak, spewing its now-syrupy contents throughout the cubicle.

“AAAAAAARRRRGGGHHH!” is what Doug howled as he yanked his limbs out of the goop, losing about a yard of arm hair in the process.

Fortunately, none of Doug’s clean-desk colleagues had spotted the sticky mess, so our hero quietly strode to the front of the newsroom, scooped up a container of spray-on cleaner, some antiseptic wipes and several yards of paper towel, which he used to obliterate the soda-pop quagmire from his desktop.

With his desk once again spotless, Doug decided to calm himself by doing a little research online, which is when he spotted a news report stating — and we will activate the caps lock feature on our keyboard to emphasize the importance of this discovery — A MESSY DESK IS A SIGN OF GENIUS!

According to the American Psychological Association, researchers at the University of Minnesota have shown that working in a tidy room encourages people to be socially responsible, but creative geniuses prefer a chaotic workspace.

The Minnesota researchers conducted a series of experiments, with half the participants working in a tidy room, while the other half worked in a room strewn with clutter.

It turns out the neat-room folks were more apt to donate to charity and made healthier decisions — choosing an apple over chocolate for a treat — but they weren’t nearly as creative.

This was shown by an experiment in which the participants were asked to come up with novel uses for a ping-pong ball.

“Again, half the participants worked in a messy room and half in a neat room. The participants thought up the same number of ideas, but a panel of independent raters rated the messy-room participants’ ideas as significantly more creative,” the psychological association noted.

The study has received a mess of media attention, and researcher Kathleen Vohs thinks she knows why. “I think it makes people feel vindicated,” she said. “There’s a multibillion-dollar industry to help people de-clutter their lives. Relationship partners, employers, everyone wants you to be neat… but there may be times being messy is good, too. I think messy people feel vindicated big time.”

As you can imagine, as he sat at his newly clean desk reading about this research, Doug was more than a little flummoxed. Did a non-messy desk mean he wasn’t a genius?

He recalled that legendary genius Albert Einstein once famously said that “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

Doug was definitely no Einstein, but there was one thing the messy columnist knew for sure — only an idiot would leave a can of strawberry-lime soda sitting on his desk for 12 years.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca