Moving

A few days ago, I read an article in Wo Bao about the author's moving house. He realised he had quite a lot of books in his old house which he kept but might not have read. He mentioned that most of the stuff we keep for rainy day when we thought they would be useful. Interestingly, for the entire span that we stored the stuff, the rain most probably never comes.

Reminded me of a piece of story written by Rene Liu. She had also talk about moving house, from a big old spacious house to some city area. When redevelopment occurs, moving is compulsory.

I cannot remember the day I move from kampung to a HDB flat. Or rather I cannot remember helping out in the moving process haha. I was afterall a very young child then. But I do remember the day I moved out of that HDB flat into another HDB flat just a few streets away. (Weirdly, now that I moved office, it is also just a few metres away.) And I remember how much stuff I had to packed, and pondered if I really should throw or bring over. I thought it was an interesting experience then, like a very serious spring cleaning to eliminate all your rubbish. Although I believed moving from a kampung to HDB would be a much more major project as you have accumulated more rubbish due to the large space you have.

However the experience of moving office is entirely different. I actually seen different type of people packing, throwing, pondering. And the longer you are in that office, the more stuff you have actually accumulated. Also the bigger the office space you have, you will also accumulate more stuff. Thus you can imagine how long it takes for my ____ (fill in the blank yourself) takes to pack the stuff.

Anyway I seen people who pack early and seen people who last minute started packing. The difference is for the last minute packer, you most probably will just dump everything into the box and bring over to the new office with the assumption that you will then look through them there and throw out what you don't want. The probability is you most probably will just leave those stuff in the box until the next time you need to move again. Then maybe the cycle will repeat itself again. In the end, you will never get to throw out what you no longer needs.

However if the cycle did not repeat itself, it is most probably because you have left the company. Then the person who either inherit your seat or your position will be tasked to clear these stuff at the next moving. Then there are 3 endings for these stuffs.
1. The person will say these are not my stuff and I do not wish to bother to look through them at all... of which all the useful and useless stuff will just be left behind.
2. The person made an effort to look through and throw away the irrelevant stuff.
3. The person just bring the whole box to the new site again. (In a sense the cycle repeated but is under a new person's reponsibility haha. Anyway that seldom happens because who wants to add extra stuff to their load.)

Then there are scenarios where people started giving stuff to other people. Suddenly the files you never see before came under your charge because you are supposed to be i/c of this system. I inherited quite a number of files due to a system I'm supporting. Haha I guess it is the time where everything lost might be found. And times where the files you inherited, you do not really wish to bring them over (then you will just silently eliminate their existence...)

Anyway it had been an interesting experience to move office. Seeing my colleagues pondering hard if the stuff should go into the rubbish or the box reminds me of all the stuff we always wanted to keep for the rainy days. And then there are the extremes which just throw everything away which may be considered wasteful behaviour. Different people displaying different attitudes towards packing...

Oh and the unpacking is another interesting sight. Some have tables full just after one day of unpacking. Others still have an empty table. And going around to see other people's desks is pretty fun haha.

Right now I am temporarily sitting in a cosy area with a pillar beside me. They say our office position is 背靠山，面朝海 though I can't see the ocean at all. I'm also not sure if I'm sitting here for long because my workstation is still not up when I left office yesterday. But one thing for sure, I think there are dust mites in my office because I'm suffering from mild rash!!! I even had a tiny patch of blue black on my palm.. weird...