How to look busy without much effort

So I have this manager, who for the sake of this post we’ll call “Dave”. “Dave” is a manager’s manager. Ever seen NBC’s The Office? Well think of “Dave” as Steve Correll, only dorkier and less socially adept.

“Dave” is out today, “sick”, so I was over in his cube this morning pulling out today’s tapes to run the weekend backups. I do this so often that there’s nothing really exciting or new about his cube, but for some reason I was curious about the large stand up manila folder organizer standing proudly in your face as soon as you walk into his area. It seems to scream “HEY, LOOK AT ME I’M SO IMPORTANT AND BUSY THAT I’VE GOT SO MANY PROJECTS REQUIRING THIS NIFTY ORGANIZATIONAL SYSTEM”. I was so curious I took a quick peep to see what all these projects were about, since if these were projects he was organizing, chances are that I’m the one doing the work.

So I started flipping through the first folder, and there was blank paper inside. That’s weird. I checked another, and wouldn’t you know it, there was more blank paper. Another folder, more blank paper.
MORE. BLANK. PAPER.
To be fair, I found a couple of folders with watermarked CONFIDENTIAL paper in them, but it was still blank paper.

So note to self, apparently I need to clean up the mess of computer parts, computers, books, network equipment & cabling off my desk, since that apparently just shows I’m messy, not busy. The really, truly busy people just keep files of blank paper out in the open on their clean desk, since you never know when you’ll need a piece of watermarked CONFIDENTIAL paper to write down a phone number or something…