The Envelope, the Drawer, and the Ladle

“It amazes me the amount of time that can be wasted doing totally stupid but suddenly necessary tasks.” This was my Facebook status of a few moments ago. It’s actually a shame that my first blog after so many weeks should be about this, especially since I have a few really great topics lined up for the next few days. But this waste of my time was so monumentally stupid that it suddenly became blognotable, which, now that I think about it, is an excellent title for my new blog series that I just thought to create about a moment ago. It started with an envelope and drawer and ends oddly enough, with a ladle. (Kind of C.S. Lewis-like in the title. Notice?) It’s tax season and my new husband and I have been debating over whether to file separately or jointly. So this week, I’ve been running numbers for my separate tax return to maximize my refund. Yesterday, my hubby found out that he would be ineligible to claim if we file separately. As divine interventions would have it, a colleague of ours whom I found knows an old friend of mine came and my husband asked her casually if she filed separately or jointly. This colleague said something wonderfully profound: “we are supposed to be one.” This implies in all things, even taxes. Hit with that fresh perspective, I am prepared to forge ahead with the joint returns. My hubby had brought me his paperwork early in the morning with the caveat to not lose it. I scoffed and said that of course I wouldn’t. It remained in an envelope on my desk for the majority of the day until I was considering leaving the office for an extended period. This is the part of the story starts my spiral into absurdity. I (haphazardly I admit) tossed the envelope in my bottom desk drawer and quickly closed it. The problem with that brilliant move is that the envelope wasn’t completely IN the drawer, but resting on top of it. When I closed the drawer, the envelope who plausible disappeared I had scoffed at was nicely jammed behind the desk drawer. Of course this drawer couldn’t be one of those nifty removable drawers. No, these drawer casters are solidly bolted, so all I could do was say a four-letter invective as I tried to reach my hand between the small 11/2 inch-gap in the drawer. There had to be a solution, so I looked around my office for something I could use to dislodge it. First came the wooden ruler. Then went the wooden ruler as it slipped out of my fingertips into the same spot as the envelope. Spotting nothing else in my desk area, I made my way to our office kitchen where I checked the drawers for some utensils. You can see where I’m going with this now, can’t you? I found a serving fork and a ladle and tried the ladle first. I lost the ladle to the drawer even faster than I did the ruler. So at this point, I had three objects stuck behind the desk drawer and my last ray of hope was the serving fork. The good news is that I managed to get the object that started all this mess out relatively quickly by using the fork to slide it under the drawer. Then miraculously, the ruler came out of the bottom with the same ease. But the ladle…that was a different story. At first, I was tempted to just leave and get back to it another day, but if I’d been able to close the drawer, it probably would have been shoved to the back forever. Besides, the drawer wouldn’t close. After numerous tries, I did somehow manage to dislodge it using both the fork and my index finger and doing an awkward Operation (board game) shimmy up the side gap in the drawer. Total time wasted: almost a half hour.