At the time of writing this, I have now battled the Ooligan storage room a total of three times within a one-month period.

I can safely say that storage rooms are a black hole of fruitless despair. Perhaps you, dear reader, live in a world where storage rooms are idyllic, organized paradises of serenity and calm. Good for you.

The rest of us are not fortunate enough to reside in such a utopia. Instead we have to reckon with the congested quagmire of the plebeian room of forgotten repository.

You know them; hate them or love them, storage rooms exist as the perfect solution to the ever-present problem of things needing to go somewhere. Over the course of time, as more and more items disappear into the black hole, never to be seen again, a storage room begins to form its own sense of lore. Eventually, it becomes more myth and legend than an actual place.

Or maybe that’s just me.

The storage room, for me, is like a personal office—one that is never fixed up to my permanent liking. As the operations manager/publisher’s assistant, my role is a catchall. I do a little bit of everything, from taking attendance, to ingesting metadata, to creating Google Drives. All of these end up as tasks that I invariably need to do. Cleaning up the storage room ends up being another such task.

At Ooligan, the storage room is filled with a variety of things, including but not limited to the event bin, packing materials, empty boxes—and most importantly—all of our extra books. Ooligan Press is about twenty-three years old, and this means that we have accumulated a lot of stuff. And there’s not a lot of places to put things either. So, mix a small storage room with a lot of things and what do you get? Chaos. Also, there is a constant rolling addition of box after box after box of new books. As our amount of books increases, so does our need to make space. The other thing that adds to the overall chaos is the fact that the operations manager position is passed on every year. The logic in the storage room is one that only makes sense to the past PA, and the one before, and the one before that. Each PA is different from the next. For my logic, this means putting the boxes in a chronological order. That way, I can memorize when specific books came into the Ooligan office and where I need to pull specific books from.

So how to actually organize the storage room? It takes a lot of muscle, and it takes a good set of workout clothes, and sometimes, it takes a few volunteers. Preferably two to three at most. A few additional pairs of hands to help out actually aids in getting everything looking okay.

But even with all of that, the storage room will only survive a short period before it needs to be reckoned with once more.

Written by Kara Herrera.