19 Signs You’re As Obsessed With Office Supplies As I Am
1. PENS. You have a favorite pen. You get turned on by pens. You have posted an Instagram about your new pens. You are up-to-date on what’s new in the pen world.
2. The pen aisle anywhere tempts you to spend $100, which you’re not above doing, per se, because you could always use a 20 pack of multi-colored fine tip Sharpies, right?
3. Have you ever got entirely too overwhelmed in Staples or any storage aisle of a department store? One time, I had to walk out of an IKEA because every organizational tool was screaming at me and I was all, “I can’t think without properly organizing my thoughts about storage containers first!”
4. If you haven’t bought 10 Moleskine’s in a year, then you have not lived, my friend. You have not lived.
5. Hermoine is our mascot, our leader, our hero, and we connect with her on a deep, visceral, organizational, teacher’s pet level.
6. As kids, school supply shopping was, by far, the most exciting time of our year. New binders! New folders! Reams of paper! Erasers! Those little plastic boxes to keep all our scissors, pens, pencils! Colored pencils! Paperclips! Staples! Stapler! Thumbtacks! Rulers! A new BACKPACK! And pens! We’ve already discussed that pens > everything. We know our collective feelings on PENS!
7. Do you have a dry erase board in your home with minimum 10 different colored markers? I DO. Jealous?
8. A roller gel pen that doesn’t write smoothly? WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME, PEN. WHY. I TRUSTED YOU!!
9. Spending a day organizing everything in your apartment into its exact spot and then knowing exactly where everything is? This is joy in its purest form. It’s like the cocaine high of the organizational elite.
10. If it’s been a busy week and your workspace is chaotic (pens not in their designated area? panic time), you spend 20 minutes or so clearing it up and putting everything back in its place and all of a sudden you’re all, oh there it is, that’s the sweet spot, my brain is CLEAR AGAIN.
11. You’ve downloaded dozens of organizational apps onto your phone and every single one of them does not do the trick. All we want is an app or program that is exactly like our brain, why is that too much to ask for?
12. Color-coding or alphabetizing anything is pretty much poetry in motion in our eyes.
13. My highest peak of organizational mastery: I’m a graphic designer and I designed my own to-do lists and had them printed at VistaPrint. This is like Organizational Craziness – Super Advanced Level.
14. If you misplace something or put it in a spot that it doesn’t belong in, then it’s gone forever, it’s dead to you now, forget about that thing. You are only as good as the systems you have put in place, my friend. Trust me on this one. (I lost a pair of Ray-Bans and still, to this day, have no damn clue where they are. {Why didn’t I put them in the sunglass drawer? Why!} I miss them every day.)
15. We all have a drawer in our apartment that is our “rebel drawer” in which there is no rhyme or reason to what’s in there. It has no organizational point and exists solely as a reminder that we have not completely lost it to the battle to organize absolutely everything.
16. HIGHLIGHTERS.
17. If you don’t have a collection of Post-Its of various sizes and colors, then I’m sorry, you’re out of whatever club we’re forming right now.
18. Remember those intense scientific or graphing calculators we had to get for high school? HOW MUCH DID YOU LOVE THOSE! I just looked for them on Amazon and I got turned on, right now, just two minutes ago. I am flushed!
19. Reading over this list, we may have a problem, guys. We are organizationally-sound and on point with our office supply collection, but perfectionism-y. Let’s all make lists of the things we want to change about our habits in our Moleskine’s, eh? Pass the uni-ball Vision Stick Micro Point Roller Ball Pen in black, please. (Best pens ever.)