Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 4, 1993 TAG: 9311230393
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALMENA HUGHES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Taylor and Liady were two of only seven people nominated by Roanoke Times & World-News readers as least-organized, while nominations for most-organized generated 39 calls. This is ``Get Organized Week,'' proclaimed so by ``professional organizers,'' a group of people who actually make a living by getting others arranged. While the pros may honor it for only a week, many people make organization, or lack thereof, a year-round occupation.
Like Taylor and Liady, for instance, after 20 years as partners sharing offices at three locations, still merrily chuckling in the midst of a clutter of nonspecific piles. Among the computers, record books and various business- related items in their latest office, there also was a sizable rubber band ball; a desk set pen holder made from a real cow pie and thankfully kept in a plastic bag; hot-sauce bottles and pepper shakers on desktops and in file drawers; and a couple of day-old donuts. Liady absently closed a file drawer, which set off a domino effect that ended with a pile of boxes to the cabinet's right resettling into a new formation. ``Stay,'' he commanded it. It didn't.
``We do clean up about every three or four months,'' Liady said. ``The problem is you'd look at it and say, `You did?' ''
Taylor added that they've learned that when you let several months lapse between cleaning, you can virtually put everything in the trash because by then it's history.
\ At the opposite end of the spectrum is Ray Penn, an associate professor in the department of speech communications at Radford University. He organizes his frozen food by cooking times and keeps separate briefcases for Monday/Wednesday/Friday and Tuesday/Thursday, so he suspected that someone might nominate him. To save time - a priority among the most-organized - he nominated himself.
Penn has many things in common with the other most-organized nominees. Many of them are educators, people who work with numbers, managers, homemakers or military retirees. They pride themselves on their meticulously arranged closets, drawers, car trunks, food stuffs, files and records. They keep appointment books and lists of things to do, which they actually do. Many are unmarried, the question being ``not could I live with someone, but could someone live with me?'' Penn said.
The organized do tend to have their endearing little quirks.
``He turns the salt and pepper shakers and spice bottles so they all face the same way,'' Bea Kempster said about her husband, retired Army Col. John Ernest ``Jack'' Kempster.
``Before we go to recycle the newspaper, he puts the sections back in order and folds it back the way it was delivered,'' Shireen Buckley said about her husband, Dan Buckley.
Barbara Lemmon said her sister, Doris Cox, following a recent surgery, wouldn't let her clean laundry be put away until she was able to supervise from her wheelchair the linens' proper placement. And Joan Custer said her daughter, Lynn Bledsoe, has her wedding gown and its accessories arranged and stored in a manner to ensure the ensemble will all age at the same rate.
Our callers muddied theories that organization might be a learned behavior or a genetic trait. Melissa Taylor said she's the exact opposite of her well- organized sister, Anita Hatcher. On the other hand, Rob Bowers said that all four of his siblings, including older brother, Roanoke Mayor David Bowers, are highly organized.
``The perfectionist in the movie `Sleeping With the Enemy' is a slob compared to me,'' Rob Bowers said, which may explain why the manager of the Vinton Kroger store received nominations from both a friend and an employee. He said five years in the Marines taught him about having everything in its place, and his father helped fine-tune it.
But family had an opposite effect on Martha Mehler, a professional librarian with the Rockbridge Regional Library.
Mehler recently opened a business in Lexington called The Organizer. (703) 464-2525.She loves systemizing so much and said she's so good at it that she wants to help others bring order to their homes and offices. She said she thinks it's a knee-jerk reaction to being the only organized one among four children in a family she described as suffering from ``terminal clutter tendency.''
Which brings us back again to the - how should we say? - organizationally challenged. Interestingly, even they have areas of their lives in which there is some semblance of system.
Brenda Thomas estimated that her co-worker Tom Padgett has about four or five years' worth of clutter on his desk. Actually, Padgett said, he last cleaned his desk top right after and because of the great flood of '85.
``Instead of filing, I like to keep things on top where I can get to them faster,'' Padgett, who works in contract sales for Home Lumber Co., explained. He said that he's always liked things where he can see them. For instance, while in college, he always kept his clean and dirty clothes piled on opposite sides of the room. He said he's now good about keeping his financial matters organized because, with a wife who is a certified public accountant, he has to be.
Wendy Wilson said her mother, Nancy Wilson, is extremely organized with her extensive wardrobe on paper. However, in her closets chaos reigns.
When the elder Wilson, a math educator at Northside Junior High school, learned that her daughter had spilled the beans about the spiral notebook in which for the past 10 years she's recorded her outfits, including stockings and accessories, she was shocked. She explained that her system doesn't carry over into her closets because now that she's widowed, she probably has more space than she needs and consequently isn't forced to organize them. Besides, Wilson said, she discovered once when she tried grouping ensembles together that all the hanging and rearranging didn't actually save her any time.
Wilson got into the organizing habit while commuting between raising her family in Salem and attending graduate school in Johnson City, Tenn. She'd plan and cook in one day meals for an entire week and buy staples in bulk so her family wouldn't run out during her absence. She still keeps a calendar and ``to-do'' lists, plus uses stick-on notes on the bathroom mirror to prompt her memory first thing in the morning. As for her notebook - which is arranged by seasons, color combinations and occasions and denotes with a little star the outfits that drew compliments - Wilson said that just the other day with only about a half hour to dress, she needed a warm outfit in which to attend an outdoor ceremony. She looked in her book, and voila. She added that Wendy, ``lays in bed with her closet door open and decides what she'll wear that day.''
Lesle Pearce, a credit assistant at Crest uniforms, said her manager Jason Cundiff's desk is a disaster. Yet the avid automobile buff can go to his collection and immediately put his hands on a car part from 12 years ago.
Pearce said that she was a slob growing up, but now with a husband and two school-age children, she's organized, and how. During the three years she's worked with Cundiff, she's tried cleaning off his desk, and she admitted that he's gotten a little better about maintaining it. Still, she lamented that most of the time, ``He can't find anything on it, and when he's off work no one else can either.''
Cundiff was on vacation and unavailable for comment.
by CNB