Long Week - September 20, 2024

This has been the longest week.  

Phase II is moving at a right smart pace, but the end is still distant.  

I'm in a 20 x 40 (?) room, lined on all 4 sides with either shelves or file cabinets.  When I got there, the floor, except for one small area, was stacked 3 and 4 deep with file boxes.  Inside those boxes were old files that needed to be put in numerical order and placed in the cabinets.  There was one 8' long worktable set up in the middle of all that.  It, too, was piled with boxes.

I cleaned off the table and started opening boxes.

More than half of the files had no number on them.  Some didn't even have names.  I pulled out the numbered files, sorted them by year, and put them in the file cabinets.  The "mystery" files went into their own boxes, which I moved out of the room as I filled them.  When I'd filled up about a dozen boxes, I spoke to the person in charge of the files about the mystery file problem, explaining that the numerical ordering cannot not begin until all the files are numbered.  Although he said he'd send someone to look at them, I knew that if those files were to be straightened out any time soon, I would have to do it.  So when I opened the next box in the workroom, I began to go through the individual files, looking for the numbers, writing them on the jackets.  Some did not have a number on anything in the file - true mysteries.

I found a lot of loose paper, too.  Lazy murffs.

There are less than 10 boxes awaiting inspection on the workroom floor.  I should be able to knock those out in a day or two, but those dozen "mystery" boxes must be gone through, file by file, to pull out the ones that I can number.  

Some of the cabinets contain files already grouped by year, but they're in alphabetical - not numerical - order.  I will have to take these out of the cabinets and re-sort them. 

Once the files are sorted by year, they'll have to be sorted by date and time.  It's a mind-boggling stream of numbers. 

But first I have to get all the boxes emptied.

Thank goodness for margarita night.