So, about this thing we called the “56 garage”. It wasn’t really a garage, you know? More like a storage room down the hall, number 56. Nobody wanted to touch it for years. It just became this dumping ground for old equipment, broken chairs, boxes of who-knows-what. Seriously, a mess.
How’d I get stuck with cleaning it? Funny story, actually. Wasn’t funny at the time. We had this big re-org, shuffle shuffle, you know the drill. My main project got put “on hold”, which is corporate speak for “we might kill it later, but right now, you’re kinda useless”. So, my boss, trying to look busy himself I guess, says, “Hey, while things are quiet, why don’t you sort out room 56? Make it usable again.” Just like that. No discussion. My “quiet time” project. Great.
Getting Started Was the Worst
First day, I just opened the door and stared. You couldn’t even walk in. Piles of dusty monitors, tangled cables like electronic spaghetti, stacks of binders with faded labels. Felt like archaeology more than tidying up.
Here’s what I did, step-by-step, more or less:
- Dragged out everything near the door first, just to make a path. Filled up three rolling carts right away.
- Started sorting into rough piles: obvious trash, maybe useful hardware, paper records, mystery items.
- The paper stuff was wild. Old project proposals from like, a decade ago. Memos about things nobody remembered. Had to check with records management on half of it. Took forever.
- Hardware was mostly junk. Old Pentium PCs, CRT monitors thicker than my head. Found a couple of decent network switches buried underneath, surprisingly. Wiped the dust off, tested ’em. Still worked!
- Then the weird stuff. Found a box full of branded stress balls, hard as rocks. Another box had floppy disks. Actual floppy disks! And a single, very sad-looking fake plant.
Weeks of Dust and Discovery
It wasn’t quick. Spent maybe two weeks, couple hours each day, just hauling junk out and wiping surfaces down. Sneezing constantly. Found cobwebs the size of dinner plates. Seriously thought I might find a fossil in there.
Why did it get so bad? Easy. Nobody was ever told to maintain it. Everyone just chucked stuff in there when they didn’t know what else to do with it. Out of sight, out of mind. Classic problem. Every team thought another team was responsible. Sound familiar? It’s like those big companies where one department doesn’t know what the other is doing. Same energy, smaller scale.
The whole time I’m thinking, this is what happens when nobody takes ownership. Just gets worse and worse until some poor guy like me gets stuck cleaning it up during a forced “quiet time”.
The End Result?
Well, room 56 is clean now. You can walk in it. We actually put some shelves in there, properly labeled storage bins. Found a surprising amount of usable space. Even put those working network switches into rotation, saved us buying new ones for a small side project.
Did I get a medal? Nope. Just a nod from the boss. “Good job. Looks better.” Then it was back to waiting for my real project to maybe, possibly, restart. But hey, at least I know where the spare network cables are now. And I got rid of those rock-hard stress balls. That felt pretty good, actually.
