Looking back

Do you ever have one of those moments where something triggers a memory and suddenly you're in that time, smiling at what life was back then?

That happened to me today over a paper-clip.

When I was fresh out of highschool I started working at the corporate office for a local grocery store chain. I was in the sales auditing department and my job was to check the daily sales figures for 25-30 stores. I loved the job. It was mindless enough that I could listen to a book on tape but challenging enough at times that I didn't get bored. One of the things that kept the job interesting was "pretty" paperclips. It started as just being more convenient to have the plastic coated paperclips because they didn't snag as easily and they had better grip so you could start with a large one on 2 pages (huge 17 x 11 pages) and end up with 7 pages no problem. Starting out in the department you only had metal paperclips, that is what was purchased for the supply closet and as you got paperwork from the stores you would start accumulating the coated ones, and then you would start having unique colors and stripes come through. Eventually you had your favorites. These paperclips were a sign of seniority, a sign of creativity, a sign of 10 hour days in a cubicle*. Those of us that hung around for a few years had quite the collection and would color code for holidays, or by week, or by store number. If we went on vacation we replaced all of our paperclips with metal ones, or ones we didn't care about because not everyone in the dept. had the paperclip fetish and just used any old paperclip and your prized hot pink** one might end up in a coupon bag somewhere. Writing about this now makes it seem so silly, but it was just one of those things that we did, it was a break in the monotony.

Today I got a white and green striped paper clip with my title work and immediately thought of those times, a time when things were simpler, a time when I didn't have to bring my brain to work, a time when my good friend sat at the desk behind me and we gossiped via post-its and played pranks on each other. My second thought was, dang it - this is a small one, no good for my audit sheets.

* We weren't really in cubicles, just a huge block of desks - 2 desks side by side, 5 rows deep.

**I had many an argument over what was categorized as "hot pink" and there was one "hot pink" paperclip in the dept. and it belonged to Jennifer. I thought it was just a dark pink, but I was quickly corrected and what I thought was "hot pink" was really flourescent pink.