The Vultures Have Landed

So, as of today, Carlo is no longer a direct colleague in our department anymore. And as soon as he left, Wolfgang decided to take his luxery chair. The corpse has barely turned cold and already the vultures are landing !!
I took his mouse. Hey, it's black. And I put my grey one back on his own computer.
NOBODY wants his computer. It's a piece of shit. So yeah, we'll still have a work station available to any new employees.

It's funny how corporate environments work when it comes to office supplies etc. - People can be obsessive about their staplers. Or practically RUN towards the new supplies when they come in because they ordered a phone headset. Some people collect binder clips that they hang up in their cubicle as decoration. Others proudly display a 'screen raising set' which is some kind of Lego-like thing that you assemble and it raises your screen a bit higher. Once someone leaves, everyone JUMPS to his supplies like broke, dead-beat heirs after their great-great-uncle dies. People will bash each others heads in for an audio cable, man ! I kid you not !!
And this doesn't just limit itself to geeks, either. My dad (who's not a geek - he may be a dork, but he definately lacks the level of technical skill to be a proper geek) once proudly brought a whole box of office supplies home once when the office he was working at closed and he was transferred to a different building. He even unpacked it to show us what he'd obtained in the apparent chaos run for supplies, and decked out our kitchen table with rolls of scotch tape, little padlocks with keys, rulers, pens, tons of pens in fact, paperclips, even a big inkpad with a stamp. The stamp was useless now because it displayed a text unique to his now defunct department, but he claimed that that could always be replaced by something useful, it's the stamp itself and the ink pad that were useful. Of course he never replaced the text. The ink went dry and everything. He never used most of the other stuff, either. Kind of like some other time when he brought home an intercom system that his office was going to throw out. He was going to install it. I guess, in the end, he was happy enough just with the fact that he HAD it, because it just sat in our hallway closet and collected dust for years.

Perhaps that's what they mean when people say it's the little things that make life worthwhile.