Got Me So Dirty I Got Me a Headache

From morning, 'til noon, 'til five today I cleaned my office. What a biohazard! If only OSHA knew. Libraries are always filled with dust. Add to that your mildew, your mold, your heaping teaspoon of mouse droppings. I had all that and more.

The problem is that housekeeping is always locked out of the offices in our building, so the floors rarely get vacuumed - and even when they do, the housekeepers won't touch desks covered in monitors, keyboards, and scanners with miles of wire and ethernet cables dripping down the backsides. Obviously, I wasn't too eager to move it either. It had been years since I had moved some of the desks in the 360° spectacular Desk-o-rama that is my office. But I had to today.

Since September I had been getting two or three headaches a week. I threw all my suspicion on my adorable filthy little dogs. It seemed like a good idea to wash them over Christmas, but while I was home over the holidays I didn't have any headaches. Come Tuesday of this week I had to be back at work and by noon I had another sinus ripper. You know the ones that feel like someone pounded a gutter nail vertically through the sinus above the right eye? It was alway in the same place, splitting my head above the right eye.

So then I knew it was my filthy office that was causing me so much pain. Have I mentioned that the school replaced the ceiling in my office oh, like, six years ago? Yeah, all the crumb ends and sawdust from installing ceiling tiles were still on the floor behind the desks, along with the leavings of the World's Most Regular Mouse. More curiously, I found several small acorns randomly scattered where they had fallen from fronds of oak branches I had in my office sometime last fall. And then there was the quarter-inch run-of-the-mill dust, assorted paper clips and other small metal office supplies that make you go "huh?"

I got all this vacuumed up, I Arm & Hammered the carpet with their "Odor Eliminator" powder and vacuumed again, dusted every surface I could reach, took down the cardboard I was using to keep the ceiling vent from pouring a gale from the Swiss Alps down my neck, and then began a campaign of throwing away - literally - stacks of useless paper. Some of it was letterhead from 20 years ago, which was well before I ever worked there. How did it get in my office? Who knows. I blame it on Office Gremlins!

Going in tomorrow, I plan to breath deep the sweet air of the just. Or something like that. Put it this way - I'm not getting another freakin headache!