A half-used container of Qwik-Sort with little specks of dust suspended in its surface
a little nubby rubber fingertip cover, also for sorting papers
scattered vitamins or otc old meds.
cold meds
little worn box of brads with two brads in it
I once found a bag of mushrooms in my dorm room desk at college!
brads? huh?
(Yes, I ate them.)
a pen
brads
huh!
Spilled sugar packets
Napkins.
one hole paper punch with dirt in the pebbled surface of the handgrips
Single paper clips stuck in the drawer joints
a pen’s lid but no pen
take out menus?
a french fry
an old bottle of lotion
files of documents that no one needs for anything anymore
a list of function key shortcuts for a program no one uses anymore such as Adobe Pagemaker
haha xp
old kethcup/mustard/etc packets
hand sanitizer
thousands of highlighters
cup of noodles
Keys but you don’t know what they open.
a pin for a local political campaign with names that have faded from the local cultural consciousness
or a pin for a fundraising athletic event
my previous boss was into having toys for people to play with during meetings so i occasionally find old koosh balls in drawers
i guess that’s not every office though, sorry
in in similar vein, lots of old rulers from various vendors / politicians / etc
no I feel like there is some weird displaced toy in many desks
for example, the desk my teacher got for me to use had a small dusty Grimace in it
a self-inking stamp that has fallen out of use
VOID
there is a “six traits of good writing” checklist self-inking stamp in my drawer
an instructional or motivational VHS tape
my new office has several old bibles and dictionaries, as well a copy of “robert’s rules of order”
handbook for thing that no one uses anymore
old employee manual
some Rolodex cards with mystery names/phone numbers/addresses written in a wavering cursive
abbott let’s be real — we are talking about old teacher’s desks aren’t we
teachers’ desks + the desks at the newspaper where I used to work
2003 and my work computer was a Macintosh LC 580
“those Rolodex cards used to be Earlene’s, you can’t get rid of them”
Ha I just looked in the desk I use as a turtle tank stand and in it: brads, one-hole paper punch, New Mexico elections pin.
been in my job about 3 months and i ended up replacing a dude who interviewed me, i guess he left his job because i ended up interviewing for his role instead of a more minor one.
looked in the drawer one day a few weeks back and it was totally empty except my cv was in it, with notes on it. creepy...didn’t read it, just closed it instantly.
below current rate postage stamp
Paper circles from punched holes
One paperclip that does not match standard office supply cabinet paperclips due to size, color, shape, or material
Tampon
Once found an entire, uneaten box of KK donuts. They were so old they’d gone solid. Not a speck of mould on them.
Answering machine cassettes
boxes of staples, boxes of paperclips, piles of my old business card that I never really needed to use and is now usless as the address is wrong
pencil shavings
labels for floppy diskettes
a penny
three half-used Post-It note pads
spare electrical cords, adapters, accessories an instructional manuals—most of which were never used to begin with, and all of which once accompanied devices which have long since fallen out of use.
LANYARD
old conference id badges
a key that doesn’t fit
-highliters with missing lids, so dried out and useless
- a bunch of manky old green carboard suspension file folders, with obscure things written on the tags that could mean anything like VERT and OFF.1 and OLD
When I was a kid, I loved playing around in my parents’ old rollup desk, which was full of cool old stuff like trading stamps, fountain pens, and postage meters with 13 cent ounce markings.
a self-inking stamp that has fallen out of use
VOID
A date stamp that can’t be set to any date later than 31 Dec 1999
Treasury tags
seriously, who uses these? They always tear the paper. Maybe they’re part of a scheme to encourage the sale of hole reinforcements.
The desk I was talking about had a desk stamp set to sometime in the late Sixties.
A huge metal bodied library style Dymo labeller that they don’t make tapes for anymore. They are very cool, weigh a tonne, but are totally unusable now.
Backup tapes for a server that was disposed of over a decade ago. Bonus if the tapes are nearly VHS sized but have a laughably small capacity like 250MB.
In my workplace, when somebody leaves the rest of us descend on his or her desk like hungry seagulls because, due to budget constraints, certain office supplies are a scarce and valuable commodity. When my old boss left, I found a ruler in her desk and my coworkers still come to me and say in reverent tones, “I hear you found a ruler! Can I borrow it??!?!?”