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- The New York Times, November, 2006
The New York Times, November, 2006
Online Shopper by Michelle Slatalla
Home-Office Chaos, The Final Frontier
I have always had a messy home office.
My idea of a filing system is a nine-foot-long table, completely covered by scary-looking disorganized stacks of paper, with one tiny area carved out at the end where I work inside a protective perimeter of empty Diet Coke cans.
The benefits of this design were clear when my children were small. In those days, if I stayed very quiet behind the clutter, people looking for a snack or a ruling in a hair-pulling dispute often did not notice me and went off to find their father instead.
But there is not much hair-pulling to interrupt me anymore. And one day this month, I walked into my office and heard rustling. Was something nesting under the piles of old newspaper?
Suddenly I saw the place through someone else's eyes. While the rest of my friends had been spending the last few years turning their home offices into quiet oases worthy of bring photographed by a shelter magazine, I had decorated my space in a style that could be described only as Early American Lunatic.
The printer spewed paper onto the floor. An unsightly cord phone cord snaked across the room. I even had a second, disassembled work table propped up in the corner because I had no room to set it up. And where did that ugly smoke-colored plastic letter-holder thing come from, anyway?
I vowed to change things. I moved the long table against the bookshelves, moved the printer to a shelf and off the table,called an electrician to install a new phone line and sorted through piles of paper.
The result? Neat piles of paper, stacked up next to an ugly smoke-colored plastic letter-holder thing.
The next step was to shop. I saw lots of really beautiful - and often pricey - office accessories that might be able to take me to the next level of office fashion, including. . . storage boxes with contrast stitching and brushed-silver faceplates ($25 to $60 at Kangaroomstorage.com).
