Moving without going anywhere

By Darrell Laurant

Published: April 9, 2008

People sometimes ask me why I’ve stayed at The News & Advance so long.

If they like my writing, they say: “You should be working at the Washington Post.” If they don’t, they say: “You probably should be doing something else.”

Either way, I always had a stock reply.

“I can’t get another job,” I would tell them, “because I’ve accumulated too much stuff.”

Exit styles vary. Some of my former co-workers meticulously gathered all the treasures they wanted to keep, then offered up the rest to the sacred institutional memory. Others just slipped away,

leaving chaos and rubbish behind them.

None of them worked here for 30 years, as I have. Over time, paper has accumulated around my workspace like an Upstate New York snowfall. Thanks to my dozen years writing a Sunday book column, I have collected more random books than some rural libraries.

Like all good procrastinators, I developed a method of handling all this journalistic debris — I put it where I couldn’t see it.

The books I crammed under my desk in boxes, to the point where I no longer had legroom. Everything else I consigned to any empty file cabinet space I could find. Out of sight, out of mind.

Until this week, when the newsroom relocated to a new section of our newly refurbished building.

For me, it was the worst of both worlds. It really doesn’t matter all that much whether you’re moving 500 miles away or 500 feet — you still have to sort through and box everything. But when it was all over, I hadn’t even changed ZIP codes.

I thought I was being ruthless. I threw away all the old programs of sports events I had covered, the ID badges from political events, my three full notebooks from a 1993 trip to Guatemala. I tossed, and I tossed, until I could toss no more. Then, I filled nine boxes with what I wanted to keep.

There are positive aspects to all of this, however. In our old newsroom, we were all encased in cubicles with high walls. Communicating with your neighbor was like talking to someone in the next bathroom stall.

What we have now is a lot more like the kind of newsroom you see in the movies, or TV shows like “The Wire.” We still have mini-cubicles, but the walls are much lower, so that heads pop up over them like prairie dogs from their holes.

You can look around and see other people talking on the phone, or writing stories (or perhaps, playing video games, which is one disadvantage of the increased visibility). Somehow, it makes me feel more important, like I’m actually part of a larger organism.

What I’m doing now is sorting through the remaining boxes, determining what items make the final cut. One that didn’t was a folder labeled: “Letters to be Answered.” The most recent one was 2002, and most were back in the ’90s.

I felt bad, but finally decided that if people hadn’t heard from me in six years, they probably weren’t holding their breath.

I’m still not sure the danger has passed, however. Just when I was leaning back in my new chair and relishing having completed my task, I saw Managing Editor Joe Stinnett approaching.

“Did you know you’ve still got a lot of stuff in a file cabinet over there?” he asked.