I hope they learnt from their mistake and it didn't happen mice

My bench is normally somewhat organised chaos, although I tidy it a bit every so often so that I can keep track of where stuff is.

I did have the "pleasure" of being moved to another site for six months in a previous position at ~WORKPLACE. Upon my return to the HQ we had at the time I find that my desk had been handed to an intern on secondment from another department. To say the guy was messy was an understatement. I recall coming back to a surface covered in a thin film of spilled coffee, a keyboard (thankfully not mine, I'd taken that with me) that was completey rank, full of food crumbs and spilled drinks, and food wrappers everywhere. There basically wasn't the space to put anything down without it being on top of something else. Cleaners apparently wouldn't touch it and I can't really blame them.

Upon lifting the keyboard to chuck it into the WEEE waste (it was that disgusting) I found a half-eaten sandwich that was starting to grow its own fluffy layer.

I'm no primadonna but genuinely can't understand how someone can work like that. I heard from some of the other interns this guy was living with that they lost their house deposit.

He had a ground floor room (and bathroom) and effectively didn't clean any of it for the year or so they were all living there...

Is the sign of someone with not enough to do, but there's a limit, some of the techs are utter neat freaks, some I worry could lose their kids if their homes are like their desks.

Mine, I call it "busy" and do try to leave it clean and tidy on a Friday.

Some of the stuff that comes back after hardware refresh though, bio hazard about covers it and, excepting the stuff that's been used in factories, workshops etc the stuff that comes back from women is usually the worst.

Local TV station was doing a piece about my boss. They wanted a bit of 'b roll' of him interacting with his staff. They decided on having him hand me one of our products which we then appear to discuss while I'm sat at my desk. My boss was reluctant at first, saying my desk was too messy to appear on TV. The cameraman commented "it shows he's working, people with a tidy desk don't do any work". The boss's desk was spotless even part way through the working day.

My office is quite tidy. I run several businesses, and all paperwork is filed appropriately. Makes life easier.

My lab is ... well, let's just say keep your mitts off my piling system. It's not yours, and you are incapable of understanding it.

My shop is somewhat untidy, but all the tools are put away daily and grease/oil/whatever spills are taken care of immediately. Metal chips are removed weekly.

The various out buildings are pretty much as you might expect ... but I don't allow trash to build up. Anywhere.

The barns get their cobwebs and dust in the rafters blasted out a couple times per year whether they need it or not.

... is a sign of a cluttered desk draw. That clutter has value: put it on empty space you will need tomorrow or someone else will find a use for that space.

Tidy desk: sterile mind

> Tidy desk: sterile mind

Often the case if the mind is still present in some form.

Tidy desks don't necessarily mean the occupant doesn't work but invariably does indicate a notable lack of thinking about the tasks they are attempting to complete.

The untidy desk is often contains in the piles of paper the information collected over time to solve a number of so far intractable problems placed on the back burner pro tem.

I typically had a months worth of paper sitting in various pile on my desk around the keyboard with the wired mouse on or in the piles of paper.

Even if it accumulated three months worth I could usually find a document within seconds (pile, depth adressing.)

One of my earliest bosses had several years worth piled with his keyboard and monitor in a canyon of paper; he still used an rs232 dec vt terminal and printed most documents (pre MS Word days, a Unix site and he used vi+troff.) In minutes he could locate documents from years before - close on 10 years prior in one case of a report on a feasibility study he had completed then.

Customer says "This fix does not solve our urgent problem". We went back to review the original problem, and were convinced the fix should work.

Two days later we went back to the customer.

Us:"How big is the executable you are using"

Customer: 222222 bytes

Us: Well the fix is 333333 bytes

Customer: ah. (pause) AHHHH we didn't copy the fix across. Sorry!

I think we've all been there, I know I have.

Back in the old days, employees were allowed to smoke if they had their own office. Some of them smoked like a chimney, so the computer equipment would be coated inside and out with sticky nicotine residue which could not be cleaned off. Anything that came out of these offices had to be thrown away, if we ended up even touching the equipment we'd smell of cigarettes all day. Vile.

Back in the old days, everybody smoked, everywhere. It was disgusting. I have done work in offices where the tar and other combustion products were literally dripping down the walls and/or windows.

I think I've told this one before...

I arrived at my desk one Monday morning to find my Microsoft mouse (the best MS product IMO) had been replaced by a brightly coloured object, a very old child's mouse, so old it terminated in a RS232 plug.

The first job was to find an RS232 to PS/2 connector, then a PS/2 to USB, so I convened to the comms room to have a dig through the cables and plugs boxes.

Having found the necessary adaptors, plugged it into my PC and set about my day. Amazingly the mouse worked, mostly.

It needed a good clean before it moved smoothly, and the wiring was screwed in one of the adaptors, so the left & right buttons were swapped, so I had to change the settings in control panel.

The colleague responsible for the swap was duly astonished to find me using my new mouse when he arrived...

No mention colleague responsible having an unfortunate accident later that day?

I would "fix" that colleague by remote login on their pc then delete some random files from the system folder

I started using a (very nice) trackball (Focus 2000, if memory serves) instead of a mouse, because the trackball stayed put, whereas mice tended to (a) escape under various piles of papers, sundry tools, and books on my desk, and (b) when found, did not really have enough clear real estate on the desk to quickly go from one side of the screen to the next.

I have bettered my ways since then (although the missus might say otherwise)