Officiumocopiaphilia
I don’t know what it is about office supplies, but when I walk by them in the store I have the urge to buy some. It’s an addiction, I swear. I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong with me. I have plenty of paper, pens, paper clips, rubber bands, mechanical pencils, pencil lead, erasers, post-it notes, batteries, blank CDs, staples, and all of the other cruft that you find in the office.
Heck, when I start a new job, one of the things that I look forward to most is stocking up my desk with office supplies. It’s a great feeling. It’s like shopping for all new stuff without spending a dime. At a past job, I remember that they gave me a small plastic trash can that was brand new. Then they walked me to this fairly large room with TONS of office supplies in it. The lady told me that she needed to run talk to someone real quick, and she would be back in a few minutes. She told me to help myself to what I needed to do my job. Heheh.. Her mistake. I must have filled, compress, and refilled that trash can twice with stuff. I made sure to leave at least one of each thing in the supply room for other people, but I had at least a two year supply of office supplies in that trash can. Muahahaha… (and the job almost lasted that long too!)
Most kids would look forward to school for the new clothes. Many of the kids in my schools would only get new clothes at the start of school, maybe Christmas, and on the rare birthday. The clothes were a treat for them. Not me. I loved my clothes. I rarely went in on the latest fashions no matter how hard my grandmother would tell me, “But they are all wearing it!” I always asked her who “they” were. She never had an answer for me, so she dropped it. I suppose that if I had friends in school, she could have used them as an example, but that wasn’t the case.
I also looked forward to school for the new stuff: school supplies!!!
Yep. I made sure that every pen, pencil, scrap of notebook paper, spiral notebook, backpack, and other supplies would vanish about two weeks before school started. I never threw it out (unless it was truly ready to go) since I loathed to throw out any office supply. I would stash it away somewhere until we went shopping for school supplies. I would load up on all sorts of goodies. I’m pretty sure I peed a few drops each time my grandmother told me that it was time to go shopping for school supplies.
One of the main schwag items at OSCON was pens. I picked them up all over the place, but never more than one of each kind. I gave a few away, but I still have 10 of them left. Sounds like a small haul, but I’m happy to have each one even though I may never use any of them.
I wondered if there’s a named disorder out there that I have? I did a Google search for “office supply fetish” and found over 2 million links. Some good stuff in there, but no diagnosis yet. I did find Office Freaks that looks like a cool site.
After using this English to Latin translator for a short bit, I finally came up with: officiumocopiaphilia. Yep. I have officiumocopiaphilia. I’m a officiumocopiaphile. I am officiumocopiaphilic.
Try dropping that word on your doctor (or better yet, psychiatrist!) next time you see them.
