h a l f b a k e r y"Not baked goods, Professor; baked bads!" -- The Tick
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I walk into my home after a long and arduous full day conference, my pants and coat pockets filled with detritus from the numerous activities. Notes and business cards, change receipts, writing implements, gorp from vendors, empty sugar bags from the coffee cart with no trash can, and a couple Advil
that I decided I didn't need to take. Right no I don't want to deal with any of this stuff. I'm not in the mood to type up contacts or finalize notes, I just want to dump that stuff and relax for awhile. So I reach into my pockets and empty it directly onto the top of my side table. Formerly this was a huge problem as it caused no only total chaos for record keeping of all sorts but also induced my side table to look like a gnome municipal waste
disposal site. I needed something...
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Fashioned after a vintage accountant's desk, nothing betrays the mechanical nature of the device unless you open a small hinged door on the top of the wood casework. Inside you find a large easy to clean hopper. This hopper feeds into a complicated version of the everyday mechanical coin/bill sorters. It has the task of sorting the various items frequently found in your pockets and neatly organizing them into easy to use categories. Here's how it works: After returning home you empty your pockets into the hidden hopper mounted at the top of the device. Items in the hopper are immediately sorted by size and density, then by optical properties. Money is sorted by denomination, coins and bills, bills are steamed then pressed into bank-crisp flatness. Card sized objects are sorted into paper and plastic and given the steam press treatment. Wads of paper are sent through a series of gentle manipulators to unfold them then scanned and categorized into receipts/brilliant ideas/phone numbers/unknown. These objects are ejected into small ornate wooden drawers just as if they had been organized by hand, a rotating card file in alphabetical order, a coin tray sorted by category and a bill box by denomination. An index of receipts sorted by date. USB devices and keys are dumped into a curio of felt lined cubbies for quick retrieval. Important papers such as checks and tickets are dispensed into a small open tray marked "urgent". Underneath a small ornate trash can receives the lint, trash, bent paperclips, etc.
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Annotation:
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Can't the bent paperclips be unbent? |
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//a rotating cad file// That would be Derek Jacobi spinning
in his grave, no? |
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Is that your junk in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? |
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It does seem that "cad file" would be a good name for something. If I can come up with that something I'll post it. |
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I need one of these! When I run out of space on my dresser, then everything starts to pile up on the desk. I've even tried having multiple jars to separate change, receipts, and other odds and ends but when it's time to clean up, I always end up with a jar of change, screws, buttons, nuts and bolts, and a bunch of other stuff that makes me ask "Where I did I get THIS?" |
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I'm not persuaded this is a good idea. Whenever I have tried a desk organiser of any sort I just immediately fill it up and return to catastrophe. Even now I have a pen holder that has nothing but dead pens it which I know will never ever be thrown away because that ... sod it, I've just thrown all my old pens away. My life has changed ever so slightly for the better. With my now empty pen holder I can spend the next few weeks glorying in the prospect of placing working pens in my pen holder and, occasionally, extracting and using them. Getting serious now, I have just emptied the contents of my wallet onto my desk, sorted the crap from the not-so-crap, deposited the crap into a bin and the not-so-crap back into my wallet. I feel 10 pounds lighter probably because I am now 10 pounds lighter. Hold that bin! Damn, can I really retrieve my 10 pound note from amongst 3 week old banana peel and why is my bin always full of banana peel when I never eat bananas. One thing I am really curious about though is how it would scan and categorise brilliant ideas? |
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It should be possible to add a mechanism that grips the pen, removes its lid or presses the end, and then swipes it across a piece of paper (perhaps one of the discarded wrappers or blank scraps). Then a camera would view the paper to judge whether the pen should be returned to the pen tray, sorted by colour, or discarded, or perhaps returned to the pen tray with a sticker on it saying "low ink". Pencils could be mechanically sharpened. |
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Ideas could be OCRd, parsed for grammar, spelling, and logic, and an automatic search run through the 'bakery, and then a little icon could be stamped on the corner of the paper - bone, bun, [m-f-d], etc. The OCRd files can be presented in your computer with a "quick upload" button. |
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I keep trained hamsters in my pockets. But I think everyone suspected that. |
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a mechanism that would automatically unfold paper would be awesome. |
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I would like all papers to be scanned and printed out onto a single sheet of paper. An 8x11inch sheet of paper could be divided up by day if more than one day's worth of reciept/note/etc could be printed onto it. Then, under the watchfull electic eye, your finger points out the items to be discarded. |
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I also thought that simple scanning would do to but in many cases it's simply easier and less suspicious if you have "The Receipt" for returns and such. |
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[Max-B] A slightly dizzy Terry Thomas, surely?
[pomloc] Clearly you're not a secret agent who regularly carries invisible ink pens. |
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Yes, but you don't want them on show in your desk do you? Best if they're dumped, and then you also have an excuse to visit Q's workshop to pick up some more. |
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