[Wondergirl]

Few activities give me a greater sense of accomplishment than imposing order upon clutter. To some, this delight in orderliness may seem neurotic, even anal-retentive, but organization has advantages beyond aesthetics. With the lifestyles that my wife and I have developed, some semblance of order is a necessity.

We are both collectors (the impolite term for us is "pack rats"). We keep stuff, sometimes long after the probability of using it has become almost nil. We would fit right in with the Egyptian pharaohs who were buried with all their worldly goods.

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If that were the custom today, I would be buried with cartons of old magazines, class notes, books, tapes, CDs, old photographs, hardware, gizmos whose function I long ago forgot, and perhaps some non-functioning appliances, to name a few things. My wife would be buried with many of these things, too, along with boxes of material and sewing stuff, cartoons clipped from newspapers, and greeting cards dating to at least the 1960s. My stuff would be neatly arranged around my sarcophagus; I'm not so sure of hers.

My wife is a "piler." If anything is stackable, she will stack it and keep doing so until the pile becomes unwieldy – sometimes beyond that point. "Where is that coupon we got from the book store?" I will ask. "It's in the pile on the kitchen table," she'll say.

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I know immediately that this means I will not be able to find it, for I can sort through a pile several times and never find what I'm looking for. Somehow, the randomness of a pile of miscellaneous stuff causes a short circuit in my brain so that, even if something is there, I don't see it. "It isn't here," I will proclaim after the third sort – whereupon my wife will prove me wrong in about five seconds.

I am more of a filer and sorter. To be sure, this involves a certain amount of piling because we don't have enough filing cabinets (pack rats never do), but there is method to my piles. Admittedly, I cannot explain my method to anyone else because one man's logic is another man's madness, but it makes sense to me. I can usually find my own stuff very quickly, which is good because nothing turns me into a raving maniac faster than the inability to find what I'm looking for.

My often eccentric methods of organization extend beyond papers and stackable stuff. For example, nobody but me can grasp how I've organized my music CD collection, which long ago passed the 1,500 mark. Although I yielded to convention by arranging my classical discs alphabetically by composer, at least half of the collection (including classical CDs on which several composers are represented) defies such a simplistic approach. I'm as likely to shelve the music by some associative technique that makes perfect sense to me but not to anyone else as I am to use a methodology that would be approved by the American Library Association.

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Still, not to have any organization at all is, to me, utterly unthinkable.

"A place for everything, and everything in its place" may be a neurotic manifesto, but it has its virtues. I can't subscribe to the philosophy of those who are afflicted with obsessive cleanliness (the people who dust everything in their house once a week whether it needs it or not), but orderliness is an entirely different matter. Up to a certain point, dirt is tolerable (after all, the ground we walk on every day is "dirty"), but disorder rarely is. I don't care if some people say that a cluttered desk is the sign of a busy mind; I think it's a sign of inefficiency and bad work habits.

Besides the advantage of making stuff easier to find, orderliness has an aesthetic appeal, though it's undoubtedly an acquired taste. At least, it must be taught. Children are apparently not bothered by chaotic disorder; they seem to relish it. Huge amounts of parental energy are expended every day in efforts to get kids to put things where they belong. By the time they're teens, we have a pitched battle between order (parents' side) and total disorder (kids' side). The kids usually win, and the parents settle for putting signs that read "Condemned by the Board of Health" on the door.

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I may have been an exception. I don't really know because I can't remember clearly, though I do recall that I was better organized than most of my college roommates. I think some of them looked upon college as an opportunity to embrace disorder to signify their independence after being yelled at by Mom and Dad years to "clean up your room." Exposure to enough of these people may have pushed me in the opposite direction.

Another force started to work on me, too. In college and grad school, I had to live in tight quarters. My cramped room was where I slept, studied, had bull sessions with friends – where I spent a large portion of my time – unable to escape to neat refuges maintained by Mom and Dad. In such limited space, disorder reached critical mass very quickly, and I learned that sleeping on a bunk bed piled with books, papers, and dirty clothes was not particularly pleasant. My organization neurosis, if that's what it is, may have taken root then.

It has, I believe, served me well. Orderliness has been a great time-saver, and that's especially true now that I have reached the age at which I forget more than I remember. If I don't put things away in designated places – preferably the same places that I have used for years – I can spend hours looking for them.

Though we have thought about it, I hope we never move. I shudder to think of the chaos of that process and the necessity of deciding what of my carefully organized stuff to keep and what to toss. I would rather leave that for my heirs, who (unless they spend their inheritance on a pyramid in which to place my earthly goods) will need to rent several dumpsters. "Wow," they will say, "He sure had a lot of junk, but let's give him credit – it's well-organized junk."

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*If you have hung around Q&A sites for a while, you may remember Rich, a grammar expert on askme.com, PointAsk.com, Answerway.com, and others. He was also a member here, but only briefly, before his death on June 16, 2011. He hosted his own very excellent and interesting grammar site at The Grammar Curmudgeon and was busy writing a book on being a grumpy grammarian.