It’s 6pm on a Friday and I’m in the lab building with my research assistants, getting ready to run a study. I tell them, “And now, we’re going to very gently and respectfully ransack Dr. Q’s lab. He said we could borrow some equipment until ours gets here, but he said he didn’t know what room it was in.”
So we traipse off down a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, until we come to his lab area. We turn on the lights as we go, so that we are less likely to be eaten by a grue.
photo by Flickr user cofiem under creative commons
I say, “Let’s start with this room, which is unlocked, and appears to be for storage. Hmm. This box is labeled ‘Hawaiian decorations’. And… it appears to be labeled accurately.”
photo by Flickr user merfam under creative commons
As it turned out, the equipment we needed was in another castle room. But now I really want to know why there is a carefully packed and stored box of Hawaiian decorations in our lab building. Readers, what strange creatures have you encountered where you work?
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
March 30, 2011 at 3:12 am
The basement of our office building had all kinds of things in it. It’s kind of the dumping ground for extra office supplies, santa decorations, etc. They have remodeled and it’s neater now though.
March 30, 2011 at 7:41 am
At one place, I encountered a box of the PIs old university id cards and something that took me a while to identify: punch cards. Old computer punch cards. So very indicative of the way the project was run.
March 30, 2011 at 8:13 am
My mom had a bunch of those in her office from when she was a grad student and that’s how they entered grades back in the day.
March 30, 2011 at 2:44 pm
AWESOME.
March 30, 2011 at 7:42 pm
I’m pretty sure said basement also had reams and reams of dot matrix printer paper. We used to have these weekly financial reports that would be printed on this paper. I am actually old enough to remember this as part of my working life..oh and mainframe email. The kind that doesn’t scroll
so that at the end of each line
you had to hit enter
or it wouldn’t type anymore.
March 30, 2011 at 7:45 pm
My father used to take dot matrix paper home so I could draw on the back. Fun stuff!
March 30, 2011 at 11:34 pm
Nicoleandmaggie started using email on a Unix system in, like, late 1993/early 1994.
And yet, our blog looks like this.
April 1, 2011 at 8:06 am
Um, I still get some mainframe e-mail. We’re beyond the punch cards, though.
March 30, 2011 at 8:43 am
~ Pick up box of Hawaiian decorations.
~ You pick up the box of Hawaiian decorations and find a portal.
~ Enter portal.
~ It is dark. You have been eaten by a grue.
March 30, 2011 at 2:45 pm
NO, I turned on the lights! oh no! aieeeeeeee
March 30, 2011 at 9:01 am
I love the Super Mario Brothers nod!
March 30, 2011 at 11:25 am
When my agency moved offices, we pulled out one of the secretarial desks that had been up against a wall. Lo and behold, we found numerous notarial stamps, some wooden which were meant to be used with ink, many metal ones that embossed paper, and all rather lovely what with the names of secretaries long gone and dates gone by. The earliest was from 1967 (which I scarfed up because that was the year I graduated high school).
March 30, 2011 at 2:46 pm
That sounds kind of cool, actually. Cooler than ersatz Hawaiian decorations in a lab building, anyway.