I find that I go through periods of total chaos on my desk and then one day a month I can't stand any stray pieces of paper and I ultra-clean everything. Then it just all goes to hell again.

Do you need a clean workstation? Are you still finding Frito crumbs in your keyboard?

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2000

Answers

Actually, I'm pretty neat. I file things away quickly and I get rid of old stuff regularly. I feel better when my desk is organized.

However...
I don't like to dust and it gets *very* dusty *very* quickly. I gross myself out sometimes when I see the dust-bunnies on the desk space between my various computer components and desk accessories. I do clean off my monitor screen every now and then, mostly when I can't see my work any more. Eventually, I get moving and clean the place up, but not nearly as often as I should. I've notified people that, if they feel the need to write their names in the dust, to please not include the year.

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2000

oh now see, this is the weird thing. My desk at work is spotless, everything organized into their little cubbies and papers stacked and filed neatly. But at home, it's a mass of junk food wrappers, napkins, empty soda bottles, and books and cds all stacked haphazardly (and presenting great danger to my cat, who insists on sleeping under the desk in spite of the fact that he gets knocked in the head by a book every other day.)

I really don't understand it myself.

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2000

I'm so Monica Gellar about my desk! Everything has to be just so. I even keep track of my post-it notes, because they're cute colors like baby blue and sage green. The only good thing is that I have a whole office to be anal about! Sometimes I stand in my doorway and admire the artful way my pictures hang. But I don't water my plants until they start looking droopy. And I leave my crusty hot chocolate mug out and the cleaning people wash it. I'm all about it LOOKING good, but not doing anything that inconveniences me.

I sound terribly spoiled. I'm sorry.

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2000

Home and work desks are both disaster sites. Actually, half my workspace (U-shaped desk) is a mess, and the other half rarely gets touched so it's fairly neat. No real food problems, though I have a lidded mug next to my monitor that I'm afraid to touch for fear of disturbing the new life form inside it. But, I have no mousepad to complain about me because I use a trackball at the office.

Home, I share an 8 ft. recycled conference table with my husband. Between two 19"+ monitors, printer, scanner, keyboards, and mice, you'd think there wouldn't be much room for mess. WRONG.

Cups/cans/glasses compete with piles of paper. I've gone back to munching on sunflower seeds and guiltily watched half a shell disappear into my keyboard the other day. A while back I got tired of my cats knocking the papers to my left onto the floor so I shoved them off (the papers, that is) and put a small pillow there for the cats.

Now the pillow is covered with a stack of crap and the cats try to lie on that and knock the stuff off the table onto the other stuff already on the floor.

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2000

On on good day, my sister can rack up about 5 half drunk plastic cups of flat Coke. And the reason why we switched back from trackerball to mouse is *because* of the mess: she left a wine glass (don't ask) of ginger ale out and I knocked it all over the trackerball and part of the keyboard. It was tocuh and go for about a week and my sister brought it to her tech friend, but it was a lost cause. We had to manuver with the keyboard for a week (slowed down my solitaire games a bit...), but now we're stuck with the mouse. At least Mr. Mousepad has a lovely picture of the Beatles on it:)

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2000

My computer is a wreck, and I am afraid I am the only one at fault. I have this annoying habit of eating breakfast, lunch & dinner while I'm on the comp, and when I'm not careful food will spill all over my precious desk and computer, including ms. mousepad.

Any suggestions as to how to clean a laptop's monitor, mouse, and keyboard? Let me know!

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2000

Where I work, where I work. Is it gross? The question is-- could it be more gross? I doubt it. I work in a Museum and my office is directly underneath an entire room of working looms. By the end of the day I have every single picture on the wall hanging sloped to the left because of the movement. Also the desk in my office has a broken middle drawer, so by the end of the day I can no longer summon up the patience to intricately line up the rollers on the sides, so I end up leaving the entire drawer and its contents on the floor. Add that to the 4 or 5 mugs of coffee that have some sort of coffee remnant in them scattered around the broken desk, papers, chocolate (so?) post-its, folders, keys. God, it is a disaster. At home i am no better at all. My unsteady computer table has about 10 cds precariously balanced upon it, so everytime one of the cats walk by they get bonked on the head with a falling cd. I can't seem to get my act together, but they seem to be under the illusion here at work that I actually get things done. fools! all of em.

Nancey

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2000

I try to keep my desk pretty clean, but it gets cluttered! I don't end up with a lot of food or anything, but oh lord, the paper. The paper adds up, doesn't it? Every month or so I have to look around and go "do i really need that bank statement from six months ago? The one I didn't open? Yeah, that's the one."

My desk at the moment is a wreck since the new baby, the iBook, moved in. Cables and wires everywhere while I get her settled.

-- Anonymous, March 03, 2000

I'm messy! My desk with the cpu and all has shelves, which are full of tapes and programs... the actual desk for the monitor has a phone, cd holder, papers, disks, and what not! Once, I drank coke in front of my comp, and I was chatting with someone, and he told me something so funny, I was lmao. problem was, that I was in the middle of sipping my coke, so everything was on the monitor, mouse, and keyboard. the mouse & monitor survived the blast, but I had to replace my keyboard...

-- Anonymous, March 04, 2000

I have this cranky, pathetic old computer desk that just houses the monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a dusty collection of old installation CD's. The cpu, printer, and radio are on some shelves next to it. Disaster everywhere. A giant pile of CD's and papers on the floor, ashes everywhere, jewelry and spare change on the desk.
I can clean, but why bother? It all just comes back, worse than before.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2000

It's gross but sanitary. I even swipe at my puter screen with a cleaning cloth once in a while. But I eat at my desk and have dones os whether it is at home or at work. No keyboard accidents (feeding the keyboard = Bad Idea), but it's probably luck and a matter of time.

My sin is that I like toys and photos and lots of them, so my workspace is always very patchwork-y with photos and crammed full of small fidgety things and small squooshy stuffed creatures people give me and stuff that lights up and stuff that walks and stuff that smells good and stuff that needs watering and stuff that is too nice to toss out but I've had it for ten + years (lots of nice stationery sets, dried-up fountain pens that would work if I bothered to washthem out and buy more ink, etc.), books, CDs, record albums, tapes, magazines, opened mail, unopened mail, stamps, paper clips, post-its, candy jars, candy bars, bottled juice, bottled water, empty bottles and wrappers near garbage can (contents are compacted into one months-old sentient lump of swill in too-small garbage can) Girl Scout cookies, etc.

If I like to mess with it while being near or on the computer, it is on my desk. My entire room cosisted of two major demolition sites before I moved: the bed (temporary piles) and my desk and work area (permanent and perpetually on the brink of falling and killing me or MAxwell the Cat. Currently, since we moved, am looking to get a lap top. I think that might be safer for all concerned. (I can make wee little manageable messes in every part of the house and all over town and not make one big monster clean-up task piled scarily atop a desk.)

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2000

My workspace is usually fairly uncluttered, but I worry more about the position of my workspace than anything else... Which is why, at 4 this morning, I was disconnecting multiple computers, peripherals and monitors, hauling them onto the kitchen counters and straining my back to push this puzzlingly heavy desk onto the other side of the wall. Then I rearranged all of the other furniture -- about 4 times -- until I had everything where I wanted it, vacuuming like a madwoman every time I moved something. My boyfriend freaked when I told him I'd moved the workstation, imagining that I'd either pushed it up against a radiator or condensation-laden sliding glass doors. When he saw where it was, he was pleasantly surprised to the point of exempting me from the impending whuppin'.

I'll do it all over again in a few months, just when my back starts to heal.

-- Anonymous, March 07, 2000

I live up in Canada and I work in the grain industry so I know about dust, lots of dust, down your neck in your eyes and ears wear a respirator most of the day dust. And the large cement building is not heated, we made Tiny snowmen two months ago and set them inside a window on the sill and they have not melted yet. If I had a desk it woul be so covered with dust and grain samples that I would not be able to find it anyway.

-- Anonymous, March 08, 2000

Boy, mess doesn't seem to give justice to the catastrophe that is my office. Now, once in a while, housekeeping will tidy it up, but mostly it is thus: tons of pictures scattered everywhere---files upon files laying hither and yon---framed pictures of the cats, friends from school, almost every show I've ever done litter the walls along with every poster of Ophelia i could find. Theater schedules are taped up here and there, a running list of quotes--my favorite being from Kate Winslet--"I'm injured on every job I do."-- (hmmm, maybe if my office was navigatable I would be okay)some crooked ugly pictures of covered bridges that were here when i moved into this office, a tower of crooked e-mails that I printed out and taped to my wall from Camryn Manheim, post-its everywhere, frappacino cups teetering on the edge of my desk, yoplait containers, computer disks, toys--one of those sea squirmer things, the teeny beany rooster and posable Mulder and Scully, candy jar--usually empty,my Nags Head vacation planner book--gotta have some inspiration--water bottles and tons of papers that i don't even have a clue what's on them, a vase of dead roses in that ever-so-aromatic dead flower water- -ick! Right now i just noticed that one of the girls dropped off a candle that I had ordered---she did this two days ago and I just noticed---very sad! So, I guess that it's not dirty gross, just cluttered gross. Now, the other people that I work with...well, that's another story.

-- Anonymous, March 08, 2000

I'm in college so I don't have a "work" space. But my desk at my dorm has my computer on it. Around the monitor which sits up on a shelf it has polish remover ansd pickachu and money and old matches and a coffee mug i drink tea out og. M
-- Anonymous, March 11, 2000