Excess-Baggage Handlers

Have you observed the phenomenon of Excess Baggage in your city, borough, hamlet, town, village, shire, or county? It consists of these elements: a seemingly employed person, often a professional, in an urban environment dragging a suitcase or some type of baggage on wheels, with its handle extended for portability.

Typically, the luggage is wheeled into or out of an office environment. Let's explore the possibilities, shall we?

a) it is some kind of terrorist being so obvious as to be, well, undetected

b) it's a lost traveler 18.6 miles from the airport

c) there is now an abundance of transvestites who need to cart extra clothing for a quick change in the bathroom just before and just after work

d) people like surreptitiously to bring in their collection of Bratz dolls for lunchtime fun e) folks are eating bigger lunches

f) there's a sudden onslaught of copier or computer repairers out there

g) the demands of the workplace are forcing more people to stay overnight in the office

h) people are saying they have to work late hours but they are staying overnight in the office to screw around

i) people have so much work they cart it home, work on it, and cart it back to the office

or

j) the same as i) but they are faking it; no work gets done at home

I first saw this excess-baggage nonsense in my daughter's school a couple years ago. Yup. "Mommy, Mommy, my books and lunch and soccer ball and sneakers and bowling ball and globe and calculator and protractor and iPod and cellphone and pens and notebooks and erasers and pencils, but no newspaper, are so heavy I need this suitcase."

I got a taste of this last weekend. On Friday, I stuffed all the papers on my desk into my backpack with the hope of at least sorting stuff out and ranking (see? we don't need that loathsome word prioritize after all) various documents. Of course, on Monday, those same papers came back to work with me, intact and untouched within the backpack. Nice try.

For about 2.5 years I used to work with a guy who did that every night, with the same result. He loaded a bunch of stuff into a cardboard box, brought it home, and brought the same stuff back again, seemingly with no progress made toward accomplishing his appointed tasks.

What a shame that people's daily work tasks corrosively leach into every part of their existence. What next? E-mailing a spreadsheet while at the communion rail? Texting a proposal to a would-be client during foreplay?

Work is work. Play is play. Home is home.

You can quote the ol' Kokonuts on that.

p.s. Please note that a missing hyphen in the title would radically alter the meaning of this post and would instead refer to an overabundance of those employees at the airport.