Paul Burri: A Drawer for Everything But the Kitchen Sink
http://www.noozhawk.com/noozhawk/article/121309_paul_burri_a_drawer_for_everything_but_the_kitchen_sink/
By Paul Burri, Noozhawk Columnist
Whatever you need, chances are you'll find it there
I wonder if my family is the only one to have that magical place where we keep everything we will ever need. Growing up in the Bronx, N.Y., we called it The Kitchen Drawer — or, simply, The Drawer.
No matter what apartment we lived in, it was always the top drawer to the left of the sink. In our house, it served an invaluable function. It was where everything was kept. Need a pencil (never over 1½ inches long and always with a broken point)? Look in The Drawer. Need a rubber band? Look in The Drawer. Of course, any rubber band you found was so old that it broke instantly when you stretched it.
But that was then. I recently checked the drawer we have had now for many, many years, and here’s what I found:
One half of a pair of pliers (it’s been in there for the past 12 years, but you never know — the other half might show up one of these days), a hammer with no handle, two sticks of 7-year-old chewing gum, a comb with three teeth, a green marble with a chip in it, a cork, 23 nails (all bent), one of those rubber things you put under a chair leg, a torn Valentine’s Day card with three phone numbers that no one can remember who they belong to, six keys that don’t fit any lock that we own, a combination lock no one can remember the combination to, a dog tag for a dog we never owned, 16 ballpoint pens (one of which works occasionally), a 2-year-old desk calendar, four rusty paper clips, a stack of 20-cents-off coupons (all expired), one push pin, the cardboard back from a scratch pad (but no sheets of scratch paper) and one black sock.
I’m sure you can see why it’s so important for every family to have a drawer. Need anything?
“Hey honey, where’s the phone number for the gardener?” “I think it’s in the drawer.”
Again reminiscing about my childhood days, every family’s drawer reflected their lifestyle and personal tastes. One friend’s drawer was big on jigsaw puzzle pieces, another was heavy with loose Cheerios, and another had a major collection of badly nicked wooden rulers.
In addition to the family drawer, I had my own drawer. It was the thin one in the middle of my desk.
Back then, my “specialty” was Popsicle wrappers. You could get all sorts of valuable stuff if you saved enough of them. For 20 wrappers, you could get a “Ventriloquism Made Easy” kit that was guaranteed to “amaze your friends and neighbors” by learning how to “throw your voice.” For 150 wrappers, you could get a 50-bladed pocket knife with a genuine bone handle. When you had finally collected the 150 wrappers, you sent them away to the company, and after about as long as it took you to save them up, it arrived in the mail. For the next three days, you carried it around in your pocket, cut yourself once, broke three of the blades trying to throw it into a tree — and then put it in the thin middle drawer of your desk and never looked at it again.
I have read that the world is in danger of being inundated by all the useless trash we each generate every day. We could solve that problem if only people would simply put that stuff in The Kitchen Drawer like we used to do.
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
http://www.noozhawk.com/noozhawk/article/121309_paul_burri_a_drawer_for_everything_but_the_kitchen_sink/