annoyance/embarrassment

I've decided to get a grip on a little thing which drives me up the wall.

I ride my bicycle to work. This means that twice a day I unlock my bike lock and twice a day I lock it. (I lock my bike to itself at home and keep it on the front porch.) I keep my bike lock in my bike panniers which go on the front of my bike. They're big panniers and are usually full of lots of other stuff - food and diaries and pieces of paper and jackets etc.

I'm sure there's a name for the Law which necessitates that every time I look in my panniers for the bike lock, it isn't in the one I look in. Sometimes it isn't even in the other one - it was in the first one, hiding under a woolly jumper, five pieces of fruit, two books and various flotsam and jetsam. Which are all now on the footpath.

There's also the associated search for the keys to the bike lock which are also my keys to the house. Sometimes I arrive home, put the lock in the bag and then have to retrieve it to get the key so I can get into the house - sounds simple, but rarely is. I feel as if I spend an inordinate amount of time searching through those panniers. It drives me crazy.

I've decided to bring an end to all this with a simple solution. From now on I am only ever going to put my bike lock into the lefthand pannier. (Why didn't I think of this a year ago?)

Speaking of life's little details - my work chair is an embarrassment. I work, of course, in an open plan office. We moved in a year ago and all got identical brand new computer chairs in a bright light colour. Every other chair in the office still looks brand new. Mine is filthy.

It's really filthy. There are dark stains all round the edges of the seat, as well as various white-ish smears and crushed bits of ... well, it must be food. (Now you know why the slugs love our sofa.)

I can't quite believe how dirty it is. I wasn't conscious of spilling drinks or food all over it, but the evidence is there.

I've decided that next time I'm alone in my part of the office (which virtually never happens - I'm a mother, I don't work late), I'm going to try and clean the chair. I've brought some cloth in from home (it's rolling around in the panniers, getting dirty and obscuring the lock from view). I'll take it to the bathroom, wet it, come back and clean the chair and hope nobody notices.

Comments

[David Tiley]

Oh yes. I have finally settled on a long, deep backpack in which my hardened steel giant horseshoe lock can disappear completely. Even the weight is no indication because I have a lot of other stuff in it too.

Food isn't my problem at the desk - it is the vast instant accretion of papers, books, old pens and sometimes beer bottles that sit in a horrible arc around my screen.

And since I work from home a lot - I mean a lot - there is the issue of getting out of my fabulously comfy dressing gown and into my clothes which are not so comfy. Otherwise I get a really funny look from the courier when he arrives in the middle of the afternoon.

I have been known to be so embarrassed I have mumbled about shift work.

[Lori]

My desk chair at home seems to be okay but my desk/table is always a mess. I do tidy it up about once a week and soon it's just a huge mess. My ten year old has obviously inherited this trait, but worse...and I am supposed to help him? I had come to some acceptance of my inability to keep things clean except that I am frequently under pressure to help him and my example can't be that good...sigh...

You don't suppose someone else might have traded chairs when you weren't looking? I seem to recall that happening a lot when I used to work in a similar type of office many years ago.

[Valerie]

I wonder if panniers with lots of pockets would help, so that you could declare one pocket to be the home of the lock, and another to be the home of the keys, and so on. Though it sounds like you've found a perfectly good solution by always putting the lock into the left pannier, and that's less expensive and less consumerish than getting new ones.

I sit on an old twin bed at my computer. It is always a mess. I don't clean it up very often anymore, because any time I do that it fills up with new mess immediately.

I second what Lori said about people switching office chairs around. At the open plan office that I worked at, people would also take away your computer if you stepped away from it for two minutes -- it was very frustrating.

[suzoz]

Every so often someone's chair disappears. It hasn't happened to me for over a year. Although the thought of swapping *my* chair with someone else's has occured to me, as a way of hiding the evidence. However, as I work on a computer all day long, the exact height and configuration of my chair is really important - just one centimetre's difference can throw my arm/shoulder/wrist into an awful state. So I daren't risk changing chairs.