Y.P.R.: Your Desk Is a Wonderland

Thursday, June 19, 2003 | How To

Your Desk Is a Wonderland

by Josh Abraham

Ninety-three percent of America’s work force is surfing the Internet on their employers’ dime. Of that percentage, nearly half will be reading this very article, (a quarter of whom have landed here unsuccessfully searching for “Bess Meyerson’s nipples”). The remaining half is missing out on vital information! They are bored and will spend the rest of their workdays listlessly reading disposable non-information while you lucky Web surfers will be enjoying childlike bliss. That’s right, folks, this is the last time you’ll waste valuable stolen minutes and precious brain cells aimlessly meandering the World Wide Web in search of distraction because you are about to discover … the secret wonders of your desktop and/or drawers.

Yes, the average white-collar desk is a veritable Island of Misfit Toys. There’s probably a promotional giveaway (or “tchotcke” as it’s referred to by Marketing departments and/or Yiddish-speaking grandmothers) like a mug or cup that contains a tangled mess of small, wiry metal clips. Now the layman sees mere paper clips used solely for the clipping of two or more papers. The novice corporate goofball might see a chain waiting to be linked. But the experienced Imagineer sees… oh no! A nest of robot insects! Send help! Call the robo-exterminator before they infest the whole office! Help! Oh no, they’re crawling up my sleeve! Aaaaahhhh!

You see? It’s that easy. A little bit of creative, out-of-the-box repurposing and your mundane, workaday supplies can outshine even this holiday season’s hottest toys.

Within a twelve-inch locus of the paper clip dish—or cybug den!—there should be a small device that Joe Employee would use to attach his papers more forcefully than the paper clip. This is a “stapler.” The beginner slacker might open the stapler and practice firing staples at a target such as the monitor or wastebasket. But the Imagineer realizes that’s no stapler; it’s a tiny outer-space shark! Chomp! Chomp! Look at him bite those cockroachbots! Ow! The astroshark’s got my finger! Call Roy Scheider!

Let’s see, what else do we have … Is that a rubber-band ball? Or a bouncing orb of evil? A wastebasket? No, that’s a pit of paper souls! Where the damned documents must spend eternity crumpled into balls of despair!

Yes! It’s that easy! Your boring, ordinary desk is now a wonderland of fun.

Are those Hi-Liters? Or Sniffin’ Stix? Mmmm! The pink smells like rapture! Ooh, look: rainbows! If you tilt your head back and really stick that marker deep in your nose, you can hear the future. Hi, Grandma Mitzie! What nice tchotchkes you have! Do I have pink marker on my nose? I’ll check my reflection in the shiny roboshark. Oh no where’s the shark?

Uh-oh. Boss is coming. Gotta jet. Later, Imagnieers!

Josh Abraham was born in Algeria in 1913. He spent his early years in North Africa, working various jobs—in the weather bureau, in an automobile-accessory firm, in a shipping company—to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. As a young journalist, his report on the unhappy state of Muslims in the Kabylie region aroused the Algerian government to action and brought him public notice. From 1935 to 1938 he ran the Théâtre de l'Equipe, a theatrical company that produced plays by Malraux, Gide, Synge, and Dostoevski. During World War II he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and editor of Combat, then an important underground newspaper. Abraham's fiction, his philosophical essays, and his plays have assured his preëminent position in modern French letters. In 1957 Abraham was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His sudden death on January 4, 1960, cut short the career of one of the most important literary figures of the Western world when he was at the very summit of his powers. No, wait. That was Albert Camus.