Mr. Clean

I spent the day mostly helping with our clean-up at the office, throwing away old correspondence, proposals, and other unnecessary minutiae from our files (in preparation for our move April 1). Of course, we also found lots of wonderfully odd and sometimes necessary minutiae, like checks written to Bruce Springsteen (for song permission fees) or a proposal apparently about owning and operating a taxi cab in London. (We get lots of weird proposals, sometimes even from otherwise perfectly normal authors, but this was in our Active Files drawer, had apparently been in there for quite some time, and none of us had ever seen it before.) We’ll hopefully finish up with the files tomorrow, pare down further what we can send off to storage — the new office will, as I think I’ve said, have practically no file room — and go through the weirdly named, anything-could-be-in-there Miscellaneous drawer. Then it’s just a question of consolidating everything so they know what to take with us and what to store.

The clean-up day, which as I say continues tomorrow, was about as much fun as you might expect, and more fun that you’d expect, mostly given those unexpected discoveries. (I also generally like my co-workers, so that’s always good.)

And I think I may actually finally have my year-end (2010) performance review. I e-mailed my boss to ask if he wanted to schedule it, since HR had said Monday was the deadline, and it looks like we’ll sit down for a chat tomorrow afternoon. A chat, hopefully, full of heaping praise for my work and exciting, interesting, and moreover entirely reasonable goals for the new year.