This is a desk for procrastinators who tend to create heaps of unrelated papers and leave them there for months at a time. You can put the desk in one of two modes:
Creeping: The entire surface shifts constantly like a very slow conveyor belt, so that if you don't at least make the effort of relocating your heaps of paper every day, they'll be dumped on the floor.
Carping: Every morning, a little robotic arm picks a random document out of the heap. Then whenever you walk past the desk, it waves the paper in your face while a plaintive voice cries: "but what about THIS? what about THIS?"-- hob, Jul 17 2002 illustration http://www.graphest...llery/hb/desks.htmlfor bristolz [hob, Oct 04 2004] baked! http://www.mr-jones...e/index.html#vidimg"Katazuke, the tidy table" - apparently done in 2004/05 [hob, Nov 11 2005] I would settle for a desk that ate the stuff at the bottom of the piles. If ever I get that far when tidying, I always throw it all away anyway.-- DrCurry, Jul 17 2002 If someone forced me to use this desk, I would just put it in "creep" mode and set the recycle bin on the floor on the side of the desk that the conveyer moves the papers to. This would help me be even lazier.-- gastronaut, Jul 17 2002 I already have colleagues who supply every function listed here.-- drew, Jul 17 2002 for those of us who can't afford the personal assistant we always needed...? anything that helps keep the piles down, I'm all for. for a long time, I'd just sort and file and put things into drawers, but now I've run out of room in my desk drawers... so not only is my desk* piled high with papers and crap, I ALSO have desk drawers full of god-knows- what that I'll eventually have to clear out or deal with. *and I'm referring here to my desk at home, not the one at work- that's a whole different can of worms.-- romy, Jul 17 2002 romy: can of worms? You must have the compost desk, where the bottoms of paper piles are transformed into office plant soil by worms in the damp darkness.-- FarmerJohn, Jul 17 2002 Lawyers looove paper ...... it's just so 14-th century. I, on the other hand, scan all documents into my PCs, then junk the paper. Then I archive the scans onto CDROMS. Then I pile the CDROMS up hapahazardly on my desk, into huge, tottering piles ..... er... ah. Um.
I would hate this desk. It would be too much like my mother.-- 8th of 7, Jul 17 2002 This desk could have some great comedy potential...replace a colleagues desk with a creeping one and turn it on as they begin to write something down. Or turn it on when they aren't looking so that items become mysteriously 'misplaced'.-- Jinbish, Jul 17 2002 I love it! Of course this would sell far too well with College Professors who would use the "Creep" function far more often than the "Carp" function. If they remembered to turn it on at all. *grumbles*
On the other hand it does remind me of a "Candid Camera" prank where a table was brought into an office and the surface of it (Specially made not to spill the following) had a very thin layer of water so whenever someone set a paper on it the paper would instantly float away and get soaked.-- Severian, Jul 17 2002 It would take quite a heavy duty conveyor belt to move the stack off my desk..-- Mr Burns, Jul 17 2002 Thanks for the link blissmiss, I missed that one. I would prefer for these to catch on for home use because I'd be afraid to go into an office where everyone's desk was doing things.-- hob, Jul 18 2002 <pessimist> I admire the concept behind this idea, but I dunno. I procrastinate quite a bit; therefore a lot of papers would be dumped on the floor; therefore I would procrastinate the need to pick up the piles on the floor... therefore I would never reach my desk; therefore I would never get any work done. </pessimist>-- polartomato, Jul 18 2002 Since the piles land on a creeping carpet, they are moved out the door. If you procrastinate too much, you'll be moved out too.-- FarmerJohn, Jul 18 2002 But, but, but . . . where's the illustration? I pawed my way through hundreds of ideas to find this gem and yet there's no picture?!-- bristolz, Sep 04 2002 better late than never (link)-- hob, Jul 10 2003 [hob] You are an extremely talented illustrator. Love the pictures, love em. I've never seenany before and today I've seen two so far. I think I'll go and nose around your profile page.
Love the idea too. I cleared my desk recently and found stuff from 1998. I am NOT joking.-- squeak, Jul 11 2003 I so love that illustration. Thank you!-- bristolz, Jul 11 2003 bz - You're welcome!!
squeak - I don't have a lot of drawings yet; they're all listed on the same page where that one is. That page has links to bristolz's and FarmerJohn's picture lists which are well worth your time. Others may have some too, not sure, I've been away a while.
Anyway - this idea is already obsolete for me; right now I need a much heavier-duty solution. I got a new job where I've inherited two full desk drawers and five big file cabinet drawers full of files from someone who never threw ANYTHING away. Some of it is really important stuff that no one's been able to locate since my predecessor left 6 months ago. Then some is not so important, e.g., several copies of a meeting agenda from 1998 that said in its entirety, "1. Review results to date. 2. Discuss new directions."-- hob, Jul 11 2003 This is amusing, but would be a terrible idea in practice... at least for me. The organizing principle of the piles on my desk is akin to the stratigraphy of rocks. Just because the piles appear messy doesn't mean they are disorganized. God forbid any would-be do-gooders attempting to "straighten up" my desk. The "carping" feature would be terrible for getting anything useful done, totally interfering with "flow" (see various books by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ["chick-sent-me-hi"]).-- ratsass, Oct 06 2003 How have we gotten this many annos with nobody mentioning //Brazil//?-- supercat, Oct 06 2003 Creeping: I’d like to have several conveyors, driving piles of paper...very...very...slowly...in different directions. And I'd like, one Monday morning, to find piles of documents driven under other piles, throwing up a huge mountain range of paper, while in another place, a great trench, going all the way down to the desktop itself. Impressed by the spectacle, I’d name the mountain range the Himalayas, the trench the Marinas. By Friday, pressure and heat would metamorphically alter the deeply buried paper, turning it into a massive slab of documarble, a swirling white and black stony material of great beauty.-- ldischler, Jan 26 2004 Lovely, [ldischler]! Documarble may be my new favorite conglomerate word.
And [dob], you have an immense gift for the absurd and the image. Nicely done, a shifting bun. +-- k_sra, Jan 26 2004 Recently baked! See link. I think this was meant as art, but I'm not sure.-- hob, Nov 11 2005 random, halfbakery