Guilty as charged

Last week, my managing editor suggested that I move into a new cubicle. I think deep inside, he was freaking out about my Toxic Cubicle theory and wanted to change the feng shui of the place. It wasn't easy to get me to move ass from the cubicle I had occupied for two and a half years, but eventually I gave in and did.

As I was clearing stuff I had worked on over the past few years, I came across an old carton full of a stack of books. I took the books out. And made a discovery. There, lying at the bottom of the carton was a thick stack of papers. About 30 copies of the same document. I felt my heart skip a beat.

Flashback December 2002

It was my first week at work. I had to make a copy of a page from a book. Nothing confidential, just some reference information on bryophyllum. I wanted to scale it down to 85% of the original size. Instead of keying in the percentage on the touch pad, I realised to my horror that I had keyed in 85 on the main keypad.

As the machine started hurriedly churning out 85 copies, I panicked. It was my first time using that photocopier, and by the time I had figured out how to stop the violent paper-puking, the machine had made at least 30 copies.

The feeling of immense guilt I had, as I thought of the wasted paper (and then the trees) was absolutely crushing. As a scared fresh graduate on her first real job, I did not dare to tell anyone about it. And I decided to ged rid of the incriminating evidence. I could not throw the sheets away, of course. That would have made me feel more guilty about wasting the blank sides of the sheets!

So I hid them at the bottom of a carton, covered it with books and pushed it under my desk, hoping that either the sheets would miraculously disappear or that I would discover them only when I had forgotten the entire incident. Well, looks like I hadn't.

The skeletons under your desk will always come back to haunt you.