Atoning for the sins of others

This seems to be the theme of 2009- Fixing messes that others have gotten us into. First with the new administration of government working on the problems of the last administration and now with me cleaning out 20+ years of mounded crap in the interior design resource room of the university I'm teaching part-time for right now. I've cleaned out and organized more design libraries than I care to think about with the worst being WKU's interior design program's. Today reminded me of that big purge. This interior design program is relocating it's classrooms, offices, and resource library to a new building (great news!) which means the existing buildings need to be cleaned out and packed up (bad news!). The faculty at this university are pack rats and rather than maintaining and updating their resources, the new stuff just gets piled onto the shelves and the old stuff gets shoved to the back. This has been going on for 20+years. How do I know it's been 20+ years? Because the samples are dated and the oldest ones, the ones shoved to the back of the shelves, date back to 1981. This is not a resource library, it's a museum!

At the beginning of the semester my class and I spent two class meetings to work on the resource library. We filled a big dumpster twice and didn't put a dent in the amount of uglied out and dated fabrics, wallcoverings, carpets, trims, manufacturer catalogs, etcetra. As the date to relocate the department draws closer the need to slim down the contents is growing so all the old, crappy stuff doesn't have to get moved and then thrown away after it's moved. Makes perfect sense. So, I offered extra credit to my class if they put in three hours of sweat equity labor on a Saturday (today). Several people signed up for the two shifts I was offering (9-12 and 12-3) but only ONE showed up today and that was for the second shift. Needless to say, I spent my morning cursing and pitching things into a big "goes to the dumpster" pile. I cleaned out an entire fabric room by myself in three hours then moved on to the wallcovering room. I must give props to the student who showed up. She worked her fanny off. And, she called her boyfriend and asked him to come help. Warm bodies, I'll take'em where I can get'em. He was ready to dig in too and by 3 pm we had amassed an entire room full of prime dump filler.

I swear on the interior design bible, David Ballast's Guide to the NCIDQ, I'm never cleaning another relic design library again, so help me Elsie DeWolfe (the matriarch of interior design).

One corner of the "goes to the dumpster" room.