At the best of time, this is a wonderful nature that helps me to de-stress. When encountered with an ugly terrible mess, a tiny voice at the back of my mind crooned delightfully, 'Oooh... Look at that mess! I'm going to have fun setting it straight again!'
But unfortunately, this nature also pops up whenever I DON'T have the time or THE MOOD to tidy things up. My hands will automatically reach out to store that paper in that file / folder, and that pencil into that pen holder. And that newspaper ought to be put elsewhere but my table. In the waste basket for instance. No matter how my brain screams, 'Oh, leave it for tomorrow, you idiot! I'm tired already!' It just didn't work, my poor, poor brain.
Yesterday, I had a little bit of free time since I've finished with Trump's speech and other things are just not that urgent matter to be attended to. So I decided to organize the payment documents.
For several months now, payment was totally out of my hand. When I first joined my department, I had set a certain procedure of filing things to make it easier to locate that particular item immediately. The same thing goes for the payment file - whenever the department purchases anything, the first process is to fill in the Purchase Requisition form (PR) and attached together with a memo to justify the procurement. The memo being approved and the PR signed, the order is then placed. Once the procurement department released the Purchase Order form and the supplier has given their invoice and verified, the PO and the invoice is submitted to the procurement team so that payment can be processed. To simplify, the process goes like this:
PR + Memo + quotations --> PO (released by procurement dept) --> PO + invoice (submit to procurement dept) --> payment released
So, all those documents make up one transaction and these are made copies to be filed by the procuring department to refer to at the end of the year (how much of the budget has been spent).
I then moved out of the department and several people came aboard. Eventually, I am back in the department again. Suddenly, payment comes under me. And suddenly, I have to sort 3 piles of jumbled up and mixed up documents which had never been filed since I left the department.
It was mind-boggling. It was a huge confusion. It was a tsunami experience. My table was buried under hundreds of pages, pages, pages forward, more papers than I had ever read and I felt so alive.
Yup, I felt an euphoria at the thoughts of having to organize these papers according to date / transaction / agency / status of payment... When Trump came to tell me to add something in his speech, I had 2 hard cover document files covering half of my table, and papers all over the place - on the floor, on tissue box, on the monitor, on the telephone, on document tray, on my mug, everywhere except on me. Even my keyboard and my handphone were buried under these avalanche of papers.
Trump doesn't like to see messy tables (which is why, I have the suspicion, that he had overlooked Chairman's capabilities because Chairman simply haven't learn to tidy his own desk despite numerous times I taught him how to be more organized. Luckily, now he has someone more permanent to do that for him *wink*).
However, Trump likes to see his staff at hard work. So he was rather indecisive whether to reprimand me for the state of my table, or to encourage me to stay back 'because you have a lot of work to do.' So he settled with a remark, 'You like to work under that condition is it?'
So now I have managed to clear one pile of the documents comprising of 4 months of transactions. The documents are meticulously stored according to date of order, items, and status of payment. The rest of the documents which are waiting to be filed, are tidily placed at one corner of my table to be tackled tomorrow. Everywhere is a picture of perfection.
The same goes to documents in my PC. They are organized together according to subject matter, and kept in separate folders. So I have many folders which I kept together under one folder so it doesn't look too messy. The next time somebody ask for a picture from my image databank, all I have to do is to ask specific questions and quickly retrieve the correct image :)
It is a wonderful, wonderful experience to think in neatly compartmentalized mental.
