![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Pigeonholing
Jan. 9th, 2008 10:56 pmIt becomes rather obvious to most people that it's time to clean up the desk you work at when it becomes so cluttered with things that you can no longer see the wood beneath the stuff on top of it. Oh, yes, some of those things have to be there; the computer monitor really doesn't sit well on either a chair or the floor (I speak from experience). It's also good to have the speakers sitting at such a height that music piped from them is audible. They don't actually have to be standing upright or even really facing the person listening – they just have to be at the height, you see.
But the rest of the great pile of stuff? Surely we can agree that the stuffed snail could find a better perch than sitting on one of those toppled-over speakers. There doesn't need to be three different purses here, all piled atop one another. One might even question why anyone needs three different purses at all. (If anyone knows the answer, I'd like to know.) Bookshelves are a better home for books than the desktop, and the poor assorted disc cases would also fit snugly into their own shelf. Those little random bits of paper, month-old receipts and used envelopes among them, have outlived their purpose.
Unfortunately, it's hard to find a home for the random junk on the desk when the bookshelf, the cabinets, and the rest of the room are full of the same sort of chaotic mess. Not quite to the same extent, of course, but it's all just an application of the pigeonhole principle: when there are more cluttering items than places to put them, some clutter shares the same space.
It just works out that the small bits of paper, purses, and stuffed snails share the top of my once-sparse desk much better than they share the already-too-full bookshelf, and so on. Thus, the desk cleaning can wait until the rest of the room sorts out its own pigeonhole problem. This may very well occur when I, as the nth + 1 piece of clutter, remove myself from the room.
Any sort of mess (including messy logic) can be lived with, just so long as I'm not the one cleaning up after the pigeons.
But the rest of the great pile of stuff? Surely we can agree that the stuffed snail could find a better perch than sitting on one of those toppled-over speakers. There doesn't need to be three different purses here, all piled atop one another. One might even question why anyone needs three different purses at all. (If anyone knows the answer, I'd like to know.) Bookshelves are a better home for books than the desktop, and the poor assorted disc cases would also fit snugly into their own shelf. Those little random bits of paper, month-old receipts and used envelopes among them, have outlived their purpose.
Unfortunately, it's hard to find a home for the random junk on the desk when the bookshelf, the cabinets, and the rest of the room are full of the same sort of chaotic mess. Not quite to the same extent, of course, but it's all just an application of the pigeonhole principle: when there are more cluttering items than places to put them, some clutter shares the same space.
It just works out that the small bits of paper, purses, and stuffed snails share the top of my once-sparse desk much better than they share the already-too-full bookshelf, and so on. Thus, the desk cleaning can wait until the rest of the room sorts out its own pigeonhole problem. This may very well occur when I, as the nth + 1 piece of clutter, remove myself from the room.
Any sort of mess (including messy logic) can be lived with, just so long as I'm not the one cleaning up after the pigeons.
