replaced by every day

Argh. So I've had this sticky note on my desktop for the past two months or so with a list of things I've wanted to blog about, and unfortunately I haven't written about any of them. While doing some desktop maintenance last night (you know, looking for a new wallpaper, deleting/moving old files, etc.), I was reminded of it again -- and I thought, I really should just pick one of those topics off the list no matter how irrelevant or random it is, and just write about it.

So I'm going to write about "details." When I first looked at it on the list, my note didn't really make any sense to me (proof of how long it's been since I added it). It took me a minute to remember what I had wanted to write.

I suppose I've always known that I'm a pretty detail-oriented person; it's part of what helped me get good grades during school and what made me a good editor when I worked for the Technique. Now that I'm neither in school or working for the paper, I notice it in other ways, like how it takes me longer to do the dishes than Alan because I like to make absolutely sure I've gotten all the soap, oil, or congealed bits of food off all the dishware.

Another thing is the laundry. Since the laundry machines are free here, I find myself doing it much more often than I used to. (Of course, I am now doing two people's laundry, mine and Alan's, but when I was at Tech I would usually just let four to six weeks' laundry build up and then stuff it all into my trunk so I could use the superior and cheaper laundry services at home. Heh.) Anyway, one thing I've noticed is that most people don't think about cleaning out the lint trays in the dryers after they're done, and sometimes don't even care enough to clean it out before they do their load. In my ideal world, I guess, EVERYONE would clean their OWN lint from the lint tray AFTER they did their own load, thus making the dryer clean for the next person who uses it. A few times, in a futile attempt to maybe start some sort of lint revolution, I cleaned out my lint tray before AND after I did my loads in the hopes that the next person who used my dryers would find the lint trays clean and be like, "Wow! The nice person before me cleaned it out. Maybe I'll clean mine afterward for the next person too."

And yes, while the recycling program is great here, not everyone has actually bothered to look up the website for Stanford recycling like I have and actually read about what products go where. (Or maybe they're just lazy.) For example, every once in a while people leave piles of corrugated cardboard boxes stacked up at the recycling bins outside our apartment complex (these bins are intended for mixed office paper, bottles and cans), instead of walking an extra thirty feet out into the parking lot to put them where they belong, which is in the big green dumpster that is clearly marked CORRUGATED CARDBOARD ONLY. And then occasionally there are the people who don't even bother to distinguish between the paper bins and the bottles bins, and just sort of dump it all in together. When I first took my empty milk jugs and paper out to the recycling bins, I stood there for a good five minutes before actually disposing of anything, reading the signs on the sides of the bins and making sure I put everything in the proper place and that what I did put in was acceptable material. Oh, and I am pretty sure I am one of the only people who actually rinses my cans and bottles before I recycle them (for the record, it does say on the bin to please rinse before recycling! I'm not being anal).

I wish I knew more about the recycling process, like whether putting oil-stained paper in with the regular mixed paper renders the whole batch unrecyclable, or whether it gets sorted out. Or whether the facilities people who empty the bins every week still recycle the corrugated cardboard even though it's not in the right place, or whether they can't be bothered with it and just throw it away. But either way, I always think that if everyone just paid a little more attention to detail here and there, it would probably save the recycling people a lot of grief and make the whole recycling process go at least a little bit smoother.

When I first updated my resume at the beginning of my job search process, I added a bullet under the Skills section that read: "Detail-oriented, self-motivated, responsible." In the continued revising that went on afterward, when I was sending it to friends to get them to critique it, one of them took a look at that line and noted next to it, "Remove -- some firms might not like detail-oriented!" In the end, I've kept it on most of the resumes I've submitted so far, partly because some companies' job descriptions have explicitly stated "detail-oriented" as a quality they're looking for... but mostly because I can't quite reconcile myself with the fact that detail-oriented could really ever truly be a bad thing.

Now you pick. What topic off the Sticky would you like me to write about next?