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Neatness doesn't count after all - tidy vs. untidy desks
There are clean-desk people--you know them, you may even be one--whose working space always looks as if it were scrubbed for surgery. They make a virtue of handling no piece of paper twice--''Do something with it right now. Don't dither. 'In doubt? Throw it out.' '' Any time the clean-H desker takes down a book, it's no sooner snapped shut than back with it to the shelf. Each piece of paper summoned from the files is rebounded instantly to the files. The steady stream from In Basket gets deflected just two ways: to Out Basket, to trash. Promptly at five, the clean-desker smugly departs from a place where the only hint that anything ever happened all day is an overflow-
ing wastebasket. (On noticing a wastebasket's tendency to overflow, the dedicated clean- desker gets a bigger one.) Off duty, clean-deskers measure their vermouth with an eye- dropper, walk their dogs by the clock, succor their spouses by the calendar. Such people exist, and some of them ask fees for training de-centered souls to be just like them.
But there are also souls like me, content amid what clean- deskdom calls unholy clutter. Cleaning up the room I'm sitting in at this moment, to the extent of meeting clean-desk standards, would take a week. The few times I've tried it, useful things have disappeared forever: things I routinely laid hands on back when they were integrated with the mess I fondly manipulate. I am, to put it mildly, an untidy-desker.
But untidy-deskers of the world may take heart. It's we who havemathematical validation. Forget what you may have thought about the swept and tidy world of numbers. Concentrate on the fine randomness of Einstein's hair. We connoisseurs of scrutable chaos have been guided all along by an inscrutable proposition called the 80-20 rule: a special case of Zipf's Law (of whom, and which, more later).
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