Record Keeper

I have always been into organizing my stuffs for as long as I can remember. I can still commit to memory the first instance when I had known I am gifted with the love for organizing. It was a stormy weekday afternoon back then. Classes were cancelled because of the storm and a seemingly good idea suddenly popped into my head.

Well, I am a booklover and I had this extensive collection of young adult novels stacked in a corner of my room. Whenever I had finished a newly bought book, it is innate custom for me to bring it ASAP with me to my school and share it with my classmates who may want to read those. I am very generous about it. I want to share what I had read and I want it more if I can have a conversation about it with people. It lightens me up when I see my books propped up in front of classmates’ faces during break time. It makes me smile when I can see that almost a quarter of the class is reading my books!

But my classmates back then seemed to ill use that generosity. There will be some who will return my books with the cover and pages creased. There will be some who will lend those to their friends without my knowing. And there will be some who will not return those at all.

I deplored it! So much that I want to stop bringing my books to class after that.

But I thought of a better solution than just stop bringing my books to class. It was just unfair for those people who borrowed and took extra care of those. I do not want them to be implicated with someone else’s wrong doing and I do not want to strip from them the privilege that I was offering. That’s why it was on that same faithful day, while the wind and rain are working together that I had decided to make a complete list of my books in an Excel worksheet. One that could literally surpass the poorly made and manually written log book in our school library.

After hours of organizing and sorting out, I had produced a worksheet of my liking. It went something like this:

No one had ever run from this anymore! I have a strong evidence with me which could back up my claim. And not only that, it became easier to track down people who had borrowed my treasured books. Other than this, I had also put numbers on the back of those as to free myself from further boredom and I had also imprinted my name in big, bold letters in the side of all my books to serve as another solid proof that the book is really mine.

Pure OCness you might say, but I call it prudence. =)