Please do not write below the line

In a similar vein, I put an ill fitting jacket on a coat rack when I started my current job in 2012. We have moved offices twice, and the coat rack and jacket have followed me across both moves at no effort of my own.

We've been working remote now since the beginning of covid, but our office is still open for anyone who wants to use it. I visited earlier this summer and my jacket was gone. I asked our office assistant about it and she had apparently just recently moved it to a lost and found box, noting that it had been there as long as she had.

I told her the story about how the coat had followed me across two offices and twelve years. She seemed unentertained and asked me not to put it back. It's been moved to my desk for the time being.

If it helps, I'm entertained

Thanks for sharing this. Made my day a bit brighter

I left a pair of sandals in the shower room at work (a shared space) way before the pandemic. We stopped having a desk there, and I stopped coming in other than for a few social events. Then the office closed, and reopened. I came back for a coffee and went in just out of curiosity. The sandals were there, still in the same corner. Now they're home with me.

Your jacket deserves justice! I left a post it note above a doorway in an old office about 15 years ago on my last day. I ask friends who still work there and it’s still there today!

Only a fool rearranges the objects in a tech sector professional's office. You never know which of them is of vital importance to the continued uptime of the payroll server.

This lesson brought to you by a mashup of Chesterton's Fence and The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

I left a job about ten years ago, leaving behind a desk with a computer and various piles of paper and bits and bobs. That company then moved offices, and my desk moved with it, computer, papers, bobs and all. I got occasional updates from my former colleagues about it all still being there. It lasted years!

You moved WHAT?!

That jacket was specifically adjusted and positioned exactly there because it blocks just enough of thr EM interference from the old ass microwave in the small kitchen three floors down!

If the jacket isn’t there and Marge in accounts receivable starts making her breakfast burrito early one morning while they’re running payroll the main query times out and doesn’t automatically retry, so the header of the CSV file can’t pull in the right fields for each location, the export writes out blank headers, the bank can’t read the file, and THE ENTIRE COMPANY doesn’t get paid!

For the love of god, PUT THE JACKET BACK!

That’s why it’s called software engineering.

We build the best Rube Goldberg machines - they take out payroll when the mouse trap falls.

Coat rack story: I once bought a cheap wood coat rack at the drugstore for $5 or so and brought it into the office to place at our "pod" of desks as only a few coatracks had existed in that office.

Later that office was being closed down to move into a smaller building and all or most of the office furniture besides the desks (cubes would imply actual walls) was priced to be sold to anyone who wanted it. I found my coatrack moved to that sale area and marked $20. (I just stole it back.)