what are the weirdest things you’ve found when cleaning out an old office or desk?

by Alison Green on October 31, 2024

What odd things have you found when moving into a new office or desk? To start us off, here are some disturbing and/or amusing examples shared here in the past:

  • “A friend of mine went to work for a museum in DC. As she cleaned out the desk she found an old (1920ish?) cigarette box, opened it up, and dumped out a mummified finger, or at least a small part of one. Its turns out that the previous occupant of her desk specialized in Egyptian antiquities. The finger was returned to the proper storage unit.”
  • “When my boss and I went to clean out an ex-employee’s desk, we found stuff like printed emails about scams from 1999, printed emails about procedure changes from the early 2000s that had long since changed again, printed chain messages with notes she’d written about being concerned and wanting to follow up on them, and so on. PRINTED EMAILS EVERYWHERE.”
  • “A librarian/archivist friend discovered that the person she’d taken over for in that job had left a huge file with years’ worth of correspondence from an affair this (married) person was having. Some of it supposedly left nothing to the imagination about what was going on. Guess keeping it at work meant it was around as a keepsake, but not in a location where the spouse could find it. Although funny they left that job and totally forgot to at least destroy the evidence.”
  • “I once was promoted into a position previously held by a man who left the company over a salary dispute. Apparently a dispute that he was extremely angry about, as I discovered when I went through the files on his former computer. He had pasted pornographic / scatological photographs in literally every spreadsheet and document he had ever created in his five years in the position; I’m guessing that this was supposed to be some sort of commentary on the job and his feelings about it. There were upwards of 1,500 files that he “decorated”; I wasn’t sure whether to be disgusted by the images or impressed by his diligence in carrying out this bizarre task. It turned out to be a little of both.”

Please share your own in the comments.

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  1. Wendy the Spiffy*

    Mild, but I found a top-of-the-line Mont Blanc pen in a drawer when I changed desks. I asked around a LOT and ultimately was told to keep it. Sold it for some extra cash.

    1. Wendy the Spiffy*

      Meant to say: The pen was new in original packaging (and apparently it’s Montblanc, not two words)

    2. Ally McBeal*

      When I worked in higher ed, I was leaving a meeting with the president’s chief of staff when she asked me about my shoe size. We’d found out a few days prior that the president was moving on from the college, and the CoS explained that the president was cleaning out her office and had a nice pair of designer heels that she’d barely worn and didn’t plan on wearing again. I gladly accepted them but they ended up not being my style (patent leather), so when I left a few years later, I left the pair in my desk drawer. I hope the lady who took over my position had similarly sized feet!

    3. A Simple Narwhal*

      I was unfamiliar with Montblanc so I googled it and DANG are those some expensive pens. How top of the line are we talking? Because the prices seem to range anywhere from “woot Christmas presents are covered this year” to “brand new car” to “pay off your house”.

      Either way congrats on the surprise windfall!

      1. CeeDoo*

        Heavens! I didn’t realize anyone would ever need an $89,000 pen! I’m very picky about my pens, but that’s because I prefer Inkjoy gel, not because I’m rich.

        1. another Anna*

          I also didn’t realized that super expensive pens were a thing, and was mildly confused about the motif of everyone complimenting the pen in the new Ripley tv series until I figured out it must be one of those secret markers of the very rich

          1. L*

            As an aside, fountain pens don’t have to be expensive! Some of my favourite pens are Jinhao shark pens, and I got them in a six pack on Amazon for $12.

            1. Nonanon*

              My partner collects pens, and I got him one of the shark pens for his birthday! He loves it (but is upset the nib isn’t right for some of his inks… something something consistency and shimmer)

            3. Worldwalker*

              I have a sterling silver Parker 75 — far from a super-expensive fountain pen; they go for about $100 on eBay, last I looked. But I got this one in a Goodwill store for $2.02 — yeah, less than melt value. It was heavily tarnished and they didn’t recognize what it was. (I didn’t tell them, either) I need to get the nib touched up, though — it’s a bit scratchy.

            4. Ace in the Hole*

              Yup! I fix and resell antique pens as a hobby. I’ve handled a lot of pens worth hundreds of dollars, but my favorite one cost less than $5.

            5. from the field a symphony*

              My very favorite pen is a red Jinhao a friend got me for my birthday. Medium nib, writes like a dream, costs $5.

              1. Meredithea*

                I love fountain pens but try to stay under $30. My favorites are a Pilot Metropolitan and a TWSBI Swipe (oh man, the TWSBI nib is sooooo smoooooth…)

          2. JustaTech*

            It’s like watches, but more niche.
            My FIL is into watches and was saying something about not wanting to get mugged for his watch. I looked at it and said “the vast majority of people have no idea that is an expensive watch. It’s not gold and covered in gems, only watch people know what it is.”
            He was both relieved and insulted.

            1. Princess Sparklepony*

              That’s the beauty of specialty collections. Only those in the know – know. It’s very wink wink except you would never wink because that is déclassée.

              I find pens easier to purchase because you can get some great pens for under $500 for a gift. I’m a terrible gift giver because I’m cheap. But now I don’t have to worry about that anymore and I like not having that hanging over me – finding the perfect gift!

          3. Hobbling Up A Hill*

            I have multiple fountain pens that are worth in the hundreds of dollars. I know people who have pens worth in the thousands.

          4. iglwif*

            There are INCREDIBLY expensive fountain pens out there, but there are also very reasonable ones that write beautifully — I’ve become a big fan of the TWSBI Eco and Eco-T, which hold a ton of ink (so you don’t have to refill often), are comfy to write with, write very nicely, and cost under US$50.

            … which I realize still seems like a lot for a pen, but since I got back into fountain pens I have purchased ZERO disposable pens, so I feel like it balances out?

            1. Meredithea*

              I just said above how much I love my TWSBI. I got the cheaper Swipe, but I’d definitely get an Eco because it’s honestly the smoothest writing experience ever.

          1. Princess Sparklepony*

            A good fountain pen is a need.

            A fountain pen with jewels or heavy metal designs are just annoying. You want a nice balance and an ease of use so that you aren’t fighting the pen.

            Most of my pens are under $200, they work well. I actually have a jar full of pens that didn’t make the mark. Some were $35 and some were $300. If a pen doesn’t write well, it’s useless – like a watch that doesn’t keep time.

          1. Chocolate Teapot*

            There’s a posh pen shop in town, as well as an individual Montblanc shop. I once went into the former to buy a leaving gift for somebody. To be fair, the assistants were really nice and didn’t complain when I told them what the budget was and that the office collection was predominantly in small change.

            The departing colleague got a Porsche pen.

            1. Slovenly Braid Cultist*

              Yeah, I went to our local Fancy Pen Shop for a gift a year or two ago and they were happy to be straightforward- I said what I was vaguely looking for and a price range and they pointed me towards some options.

              What’s dangerous for me is the inks. I don’t hand write so much that I go through it and I probably already have more than I can ever use, but those irresistible little bottles….

              1. Princess Sparklepony*

                I get that ink love. But don’t buy brown ink and try to write checks with it. It doesn’t register in the check reading machines. I think it was a light brown, I can’t remember but it took a minute to figure out what was going wrong with my bill paying.

        6. Oost-Bear*

          Yeah, pens get into the bottom end of the realm of fine art… Having been gotten into this by mistake a few years back by my wife, I’ve gotten to be a pretty decent pen nerd… but I can tell you from experience that if you’re north of $150 on the pen you’re paying for the art, not the writing experience. (My favourite is a TWSBI Vac 700-R Iris at … I paid $70, I think they run $80 these days. A very _functional_ pen with a prodigious amount of ink and a very pretty iridescent-rainbow treatment on the metal bits. I thought about a Visconti Starry Night for a while, but the thing is I’d just mount it on the wall and not _use_ it, and this runs counter to my Scottish sensibilities.. )

          But yeah, for every day? Gimme an Uni ONE at about $4… :)

    4. badger*

      I was cleaning out my home office desk drawer recently and found a mechanical pencil from the company I left in 2009.

      The desk in my actual office had four old desk phones in one drawer and a stash of plastic grocery bags in another.

        1. WellRed*

          I gave my mom poly bags for Christmas that I collected asking around at various haunts of mine after they outlawed them in her area.

    5. Just My Two Cents*

      Definitely beats the brand new mug and nearly new Trader Joe’s tote bag I ended up with.

      1. Tinkerbell*

        When I started at my tiny one-room library – which had been closed for nearly a year since the previous librarian retired – I discovered the bottom drawer in my desk was 2/3 full of Captain D’s tartar sauce packets. Captain D’s was the only fast food within reasonable driving distance, and this was probably YEARS worth of accumulation.

        I used gloves to clean it out.

      2. Princess Sparklepony*

        Count yourself lucky, all that I’ve ever found in a new desk is the squirrel pile of problems that the person before me didn’t want to deal with. So weird things that need unraveling and fixing and each would take you days to figure out what was wrong, who can get it fixed, and then did it really need to have anything done… Turns out they always need to be dealt with.

    6. dontbeadork*

      I just found somebody’s wedding band. It apparently didn’t belong to the guy who had the classroom before me. I have no idea whose it was; I just turned it into the office and almost forgot about it until someone mentioned that nobody had ever claimed it.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        I feel like someone creative could write a devastating 6-word story about a lost wedding ring–never claimed.

        3. Tinkerbell*

          There’s an awesome line from Del Amitri’s song “Lonely:”

          The crazy thing about a golden ring
          Is it will melt in any fire
          But I didn’t think for a minute
          She would simply melt at his desire

      2. H.Regalis*

        I found a man’s wedding band in the gutter on the side of a major road where I lived. Pretty sure the marriage didn’t end well and that the guy threw it out of his vehicle.

    7. perstreperous*

      I found a room in our very under-occupied office which contained a desk, a chair and a couple of dozen corporate awards, including some which were clearly expensively produced as they contained gold and/or silver. After some to-and-fro the decision was that we sell them and spend the proceeds on a good night out for the team. This was done and it was indeed a good night out.

      (Apparently someone had previously left suddenly and cleared out everything except their corporate awards …).

    10. Linda Hosman*

      I inherited a desk one time from a retired lab researcher at a university and way back inside one of the drawers was the BEST fine-pointed tweezers that I had ever seen. That was 25 years ago and they are still my go-to tweezers for difficult tweezing jobs!

  2. SWMBO*

    I moved to a new workplace to take over as boss of a small team. Five of us were based in a smallish room away from the main office. It was an absolute mess.

    My first weekend, I came in with binliners and rubber gloves to clean it up. Under a teetering pile of newspapers dating back months, I found a dinner plate with the fossilised remains of what looked like it had once been a fried breakfast complete with ketchup.

    1. Paint N Drip*

      I hate that you had to do this, but I’m imaging how wonderful it would be to get to a truly fresh start. Bet it made a big impression on the employees

    2. MigraineMonth*

      I once worked at a toy store owned by a very disorganized woman with young children who strongly believed in just stashing things under the counter. Credit card receipts going back 3 years? Under the counter. Broken toy to be returned to manufacturer? Under the counter. Scanner that doesn’t interface with the inventory system? Under the counter. Returned item? Under the counter. Lost & found item? Under the counter.

      When I got bored, I tried organizing the years worth of detritus and to my distress, I learned that she had taken the same approach to her kids’ snack pouches and juice boxes 3 years earlier. Eww.

  3. WeirdChemist*

    Two, both involving the supplies drawer (ie the thin one that people usually store pens and sticky notes in):

    At an old job, apparently the person who had the desk before me broke the drawer, and duct taped it back on when he left. After a week of it constantly falling off into my lap, I just threw the whole drawer away rather than try to keep the tape job.

    At my next job, apparently the person who had the desk before me used that drawer to store nail clippings :/

      1. Keep your clippings to yourself*

        I added a nail-clipping story in another comment thread, too! What is wrong with people?

        3. Worldwalker*

          Maybe they believe that a witch-doctor would find their nail clippings in the trash and use the clippings to put a curse on them?

          Other than that, I’ve got nothing.

            1. Vio*

              I don’t care where they do it so long as they do it privately, hygienically and clean up afterwards. I have no idea why there are so many people that seem to think it’s fine to do in public and/or leave their clippings around though. Maybe they’re desperate to prove that they’re not demons by showing that their clipped nails don’t continue to grow?

    3. Moose*

      That’s nasty. How have so many people never heard of a trash can? Or clipping their nails at home? Yick

    6. career coach by the sea*

      Another +1 for nail clippings in a top drawer. Years worth of clippings (previous employee had been in the position for quite some time)– and this was the 90s when one still needed all the storage space in a desk!

      1. Mrs. Smith*

        Not weird per se, but surprising: I, fresh out of school with a degree but not much practical experience, replaced someone who evidently was laboring under the pretense that he had not been fired – they just forgot to renew his contract for the upcoming school year. In his desk I found a pair of shoes and some other personal items, at least one pay stub from which I deduced my starting salary was higher than his departing one, and a handwritten note from my new/his old boss detailing exactly in what ways the departing employee was deficient. Altogether, it was a mildly ominous but instructive way to begin. Sixteen years later I am no longer a rookie, the boss has also departed, and I can see from here why the previous occupant got canned. I think I won this one.

      2. Jasmine*

        Good grief! Don’t people have a trash can next to the desk for an emergency clip? Anything more – go get a manicure on your lunch break!

    7. Not a Penguin*

      I too found nail clippings when we were removing some heavy furniture for a re-carpeting. How nasty.

  4. English Rose*

    A whole mummified rat. In a desk that had been in a storage facility for ten years. It was as gross as it sounds…

      2. badger*

        Back in the day when I worked at Blockbuster Video, we found half a decomposing mouse under the vacuum cleaner in the back room. I didn’t ask questions.

        1. Worldwalker*

          I used to have a pair of pygmy mice. (think a mouse whose adult size is about the size of a pecan in the shell) One of them got out, and for the next year, we couldn’t catch it. When we moved, we found its little skeleton (they have short lifespans) in a void space under a bookcase … curled up on a pile of sunflower seeds and other tasty foods that it had pilfered from the birdfood. That mouse lived its best life, and died in its sleep, of old age, on a pile of food!

      3. The Other Katie*

        I can’t quite decide if I’d rather find a whole rat or half a rat. (Obviously no rat is the best find.)

        1. Dancing Otter*

          My BIL’s cat was a backyard huntress. My MIL said that finding half a dead bird was much worse — because she knew she’d see the other half again, in a far nastier state.

        2. Freya*

          Mummified either, for me. One of the cats in a household I used to live in would catch rabbits and bring them to the back door to leisurely eat the bits he wanted and presumably gift us the rest… One of the things I require in an outside door mat now is the ability to be hosed off without touching it!

    3. Anon (and on and on)*

      I once supported an attorney at a completely toxic law firm. She had found mouse poop in her desk when she started, and it became a metaphor for her whole experience working there.

    4. Former lab rat*

      Warning for discussion of animal work in labs.

      This reminds me of the time I found a paper towel around a cone shaped object while cleaning out a lab freezer and my fellow grad students ran away laughing when I asked what it was. It turns out the lab had previously done animal work and would sometimes dissect mice which had to take place in a safety cabinet. As part of working in the safety cabinet you typically spray everything with alcohol. This safety cabinet also had an open flame so that we could purify instruments. An overzealous grad student had thoroughly dosed the mouse in alcohol but then put it too close to the flame so it caught fire. After the dissection, the body should have been taken to a specific place to dispose but she didn’t know how to explain that it caught on fire so instead wrapped it in the paper towels and put it in the freezer where it stayed secreted away for years until I found it.

      3. Quill*

        Sounds about right for student labs, unfortunately…

        My great lab find was chemicals that expired before I was born.

        1. Nonanon*

          I had a high school chemistry teacher that found solid sodium in a supply closet. She had to call the fire department to dispose of it.
          (for those unaware, pure solid sodium is VERY reactive, and should probably not be forgotten in a high school’s supply closet)

          1. Reluctant Mezzo*

            My husband would have love to have taken it out to a quarry and shot it off. Though he wouldn’t have done it, he would have thought about it (yes, he was a firebug, but he was a *safety nut* firebug. The OSHA inspector always looked so disappointed when he left).

          2. kelly*

            Oh! I know a chemistry professor that needed to dispose of some solid sodium, and also wanted to do an experiment with it. He sprinted from the chemistry building to the (fishless) pond and lobbed it in from a distance.

          3. Christine*

            Mythbusters has a great episode on alkali metal reactions. Toilet explosions, ftw! I show it in my HS chemistry classes.

            1. Kuddel Daddeldu*

              That will get the student body… ideas.
              If they’re like my AP chem class was, they’ll act on those ideas. Hopefully following proper safety protocols (we did).

        2. Worldwalker*

          It’s not quite a thing in a desk, but it’s a thing inherited:

          When I was a newbie Tandy Leather manager, and just taking over my store, I unearthed two cartons of some kind of spray-on leather finish that had been made some time in the 60s. (this was the early 90s) There were a couple of customers in the store when I opened a carton, and one of them wanted me to test it out for them. (we were all pretty curious about this stuff) I grabbed a scrap to test it on … and shortly afterwards, the customers bailed out via the front door and I bailed out the back. We held our respective doors open until the cross-ventilation aired the place out enough. Clearly some kind of chemical reaction had taken place in those cans. (needless to say, not having any plans for gas warfare, they didn’t want any)

          That was only the beginning of my problems with those things. I couldn’t get rid of them. And this was the smallest store in the region — I had to. (there were things that would actually make us money, instead of asphyxiating random customers, that could go under that shelf) It was illegal to put them out in the trash, for obvious reasons. The local hazardous waste takeback was only residential. I couldn’t sneak them into someone else’s dumpster because our name was all over them. I called a hazmat disposal company (recommended by the local fire department, who I’d called about disposing of these things) and what they would charge to put them in a barrel and bury them made the home office nearly faint. I just couldn’t lose them!

          Then I had a brilliant idea: First, you need to know two things. One, we had a small loading dock out back — just big enough for the truck to pull up to and deliver our weekly shipments. Two, it was on an alley frequented, especially at night, by some rather unsavory people. (this was in an industrial/commercial area near LA) Two, while it was a clear spray finish, the lids of the spray cans were bright red. So, I put a case of the things out on the loading dock one afternoon. It was gone by the time I locked up for the night. Next day, the other case. Same result. Plausible deniability: “I put them out to bring my car around and get them after work, and they were stolen!”

          I giggle to this day imagining some tagger working his way out on a freeway sign, whipping out his red-topped spray can … and giving the sign a clear, weather-resistant coating.

          1. Reluctant Mezzo*

            Encasing some items in quick-drying cement in an old paint can and disposed of then is also an alternative for Exotic Things.

        3. Teddy Mercury*

          In high school, mid 90s, we found a 100ml beaker of mercury in a cupboard. These days they probably would have evacuated the school, but instead we played with it for a few days before the teacher wondered what was so interesting and confiscated it.

          1. Christine*

            Back in the early 70s, my teacher poured a goodly amount of mercury into a box which we then passed around the room. No lid, just open to the air. No one dropped it, which is amazing in retrospect. We did paw at it freely, though.

        4. Reluctant Mezzo*

          Sounds like what happened when my husband cleaned out the chemical cupboard after he replaced his predecessor; the most interesting item was a *rusting* can of ether. (yes, that is a BAD THING). All the bad little chemicals were disposed of in a safe matter.

    5. Jonathan MacKay*

      This past Christmas, my brother and his family brought their young cat (2.5 years) along. I came down stairs to loud chatter and hysterical laughter. My mother and sister-in-law were watching the cat bat a toy around with more energy than she had displayed all day.

      It wasn’t a toy. It was a mummified mouse, that we have no idea where it came from. Our best guess? It came from inside our Soviet-era piano. (As it was made somewhere in the USSR, we have joked about it being made with old recycled tank parts. Turns out, not a joke!) Who knows how long it was there!

      1. Worldwalker*

        Cats being cats, be happy it was mummified. One of my cats has a huge prey drive — when we move to the old house in Maine that I inherited, he’ll be a great mouser, and I’ll need one; that house is so totally rodent-permeable. I fully expect him to deposit a dead mouse in my bed while I’m in it. He’s just that kind of cat.

        Long ago, when for complicated architectural and HVAC reasons, I usually slept in a sleeping bag, the cat I had at the time inserted an escaped hamster into my sleeping bag. You would not believe how fast a person can evacuate from a mummy bag, without unzipping it, when they realize they’re not alone in there. (and I swear that cat was smirking)

        2. Grimalkin*

          Relatedly, Jonathan MacKay’s story reminded me of one of my own:
          Back when I was a kid, maybe eight or nine years old, I went to my bedroom and found a dead mouse on my bed. And it took a few minutes to convince my parents to come upstairs and do something about it, because they had just bought a new, somewhat-realistic mouse toy and was convinced that THAT was what I had found on the bed, and little me had just mistaken the toy mouse for the real thing. But no. Actual dead mouse. On the bed where I sleep.
          To be fair to my parents, I’ve lived with multiple cats in the same suburban setting for over 30 years now, and that remains the only instance in which I’ve found a dead mouse. Or a mouse of any kind, for that matter…

        3. KW10*

          Similar story – my cats once deposited a live cockroach onto my bed! I’m sure the cats were very confused about why I screamed instead of being grateful for their present :)

          1. Jonathan MacKay*

            Something we’ve been scratching our heads about for about 30 years, (including 15 years after the cat passed!) is how the heck did our cat manage to catch a dragonfly in her mouth…. WITHOUT killing it.

            Getting a cat to let go of her prize through a sliding glass door is one thing, but that was nothing compared to the freak-out when the thing FLEW OFF!

    6. mom_cubed*

      My library branch just moved to a new location, and while cleaning out and packing, a coworker found a dead bat in a container that was on a high shelf. Wasn’t totally mummified, but had been there awhile.

    7. Worldwalker*

      To be fair, if you’re going to find a dead rat in a desk drawer, it’s better mummified than most of the other options. Like, y’know, fresh. And a live rat would be even worse.

    8. allathian*

      Oh noo!

      When I worked retail as a college student, my small corner store also had a meat counter (I learned to properly cut meat early). One morning when I was setting it up, I saw a rotten tenderloin steak in the middle of the floorspace behind the counter. I wondered how it had got there and how the person who cleaned the counter at closing the night before hadn’t noticed it. I grabbed the cleaning gloves and turned it over, and the underside was full of crawling maggots! I nearly threw up then and there. But it must’ve fallen and been kicked under the counter some days earlier at least, I never knew who the guilty party was and why they didn’t just pick it up and throw it away rather than kick it under the counter. The shape of the counter was such that it was extremely unlikely that the meat had fallen under it by accident.

  5. evernerd*

    When my dad was looking for an office for his non-profit business, we visited a space where the previous tenants had left quite suddenly, not even taking any of their personal items out of their desk. As a pre-teen, it was lot of fun to comb through these until I ran into the full Kama Sutra manual. The man showing us the space laughed awkwardly, and asked me to put the book down, but then weirdly offered it to my dad to take home instead. My dad did not rent the space, or take the book.

  6. ghostlight*

    I worked at a theatre and we had this random storage closet in a company-owned apartment building. I was tasked with cleaning it out and organizing it during a slower week. In it we found no less than 20 vases leftover from opening night bouquets (I returned them to the singular florist in town who was happy to reuse them), several Very Gross A/C units, and a first edition print of Stephen King’s IT which was definitely haunted and I still have to this day!

    3. Yes And*

      I have a hunch there’s going to be a lot of theater stories on this topic. The stuff that accumulates in prop closets can be… surprising.

  7. UpstateDownstate*

    Oh this is going to be a good post, I can’t wait to see what everyone says.

    About 10 years ago I cleared out the desk of a departed employee who worked in PR/events. I found an envelope stuffed with Forever stamps. I am still using them to this day and I’ve got ways to go!

    1. profe*

      Nice! All I inherited in my desk was an inordinate number of paperclips. So many that I have supplied the department for 6 years now and still have a perfectly normal amount.

      1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        At my last job, about six months after I started, I decided one day to clean out my desk of paperclips. I don’t know why the person who had it before me had so many paperclips, but my coworkers were incredulous that I was sorting paperclips…until it became obvious that I had about 2000 in the desk, at which point they were like, “Oh, now we see.”

          1. Worldwalker*

            Well, when one end is unbent, they become what I call the “Universal Technician’s Tool” — I actually have one with a keychain ring on it hanging on the pegboard by my desk for various uses.

            They’re perfect for pushing those little reset buttons at the bottom of a hole in some electronics, or (if you still have an optical drive) the one for opening the tray when the computer is turned off.

            Bend about a 1/8″ hook on the end with pliers and you have a thing to get random debris out of your keyboard. Don’t ask how I know.

            Unbend them at the middle instead and they become hooks for everything from Christmas ornaments to a light set of headphones. The larger paperclips are particularly good for that. You can also use four of them in hook mode to hang a small basket under a wire shelf, making use of the wasted space above the lower shelf. This is particularly handy in a bathroom.

            Link several into a chain and you have something to control things that tend to slide off where they’re put, or tie an upright thing to a vertical support, such as a bookshelf leg (for the open kind of bookshelves).

            The older (and hence heavier-gauge) paperclips are better than the newer, flimsier ones. I keep an eye out for them at estate sales.

            About the only thing I don’t do with paperclips is clip papers with them!

            2. Sweet Fancy Pancakes*

              In every library I’ve worked in, we’ve used half-unbent paperclips to hang things from the drop ceiling.

              2. Middle Aged Lady*

                Way back in the day in the library we used them to clear the tractor paper printers of sruck pieces of paper.

              3. Freya*

                The downlight light fittings in the loungeroom at my parents place have just enough space to wedge a paperclip in a safe spot. Tinsel ended up draped across the ceiling the Christmas we figured that out.

          2. Christine*

            I teach, and that still requires paper, especially since I’m in an adult high school program which supplies everything for the students. Handouts are my life, and I have over a dozen file drawers full. Paperclips are vital!

  8. Scholarly Publisher*

    A rubber stamp saying “This article is also available in Esperanto”.

    To my knowledge, we have never published Esperanto-language works, but this stamp was in our mailroom for years until I finally took it to my desk. The actual stamp part is gone, but I’m keeping it to mystify whoever ultimately cleans out my desk.

    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      I guess someone wanted to be ready in case you started publishing in Esperanto. (Sometimes I wish my coworkers showed anything approaching that level of forethought.)

    2. OperaArt*

      “Ĉi tiu artikolo haveblas ankaŭ en Esperanto”

      That’s the translation into Esperanto, if my beginner level knowledge is correct.

    3. ThursdaysGeek*

      Oooh, I’m retiring in a couple of months and I’d planned on cleaning everything out. Now, maybe I’ll have to come up with a few bizarre items to hide in various desk drawers.

        1. ThursdaysGeek*

          I have a petrified lime, and I just wrote on it in sharpie that I have left it on purpose.

      2. Worldwalker*

        Some years ago, I was in the hospital and the only thing I wanted to eat, for various reasons, was grapes. That amounted to a fair number of grapes. At one point, there was a grape accident with a just-delivered tray and grapes rolled everywhere, with about three staffers chasing grapes all over the place. When I was discharged, I carefully placed a grape neatly on the pillow of my bed.

  9. Froggi*

    A reusable travel mug in the back of a cabinet that was still filled with liquid. I do not know what the liquid was. No one had worked in the office for over a year. I threw out the whole mug.

    2. Hannah Lee*

      Also Beverage related:

      Multiple foam cups from Dunkin’ Donuts, the kind they serve ‘to go’ coffee in, in the top rack of a dishwasher.

      1. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

        When I worked in retail, I once opened up a display trunk on the sales floor and was *very* surprised to find a Dunkin’ Donuts frozen latte cup, half full, inside. I have no idea how long it was there- no one would think to open any of the trunks regularly unless they were being moved or sold. It’s possible it had been there for months.

      1. Strive to Excel*

        I’d guess the liquid itself had gone beyond mold and was steadily alchemizing into its own new non-carbon-based life form.

  10. Bunch Harmon*

    When I took over a department, I cleaned out a storage closet from someone who had been in the position for 30+ years. He kept a LOT of things because “they might come in handy some day”. The best thing I found was an old scooter, that he used when he was located in a different building. That building was so large that he would scooter to meetings on the other side. He’d been in the current building for over a decade but still kept the scooter.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        At OldExjob, they used bikes to ride around in Plant 2. I sometimes had to go over there and talk to someone in the office and it was quite a hike from the door all the way to their desk.

        1. Annie*

          Yes, at an unnamed manufacturing facility, a lot of people rode bikes because the facility was about a mile long. You didn’t want to take that walk if you didn’t have to, not just because of the walk but because of the time wasted during a work day.

    2. Boss on the move*

      The president of my former company has MS and he rode a segway all over the building (offices plus a manufacturing plant).

      1. Worldwalker*

        Apparently the use case for Segways, aside from novelty city tours, has turned out to be instead of bicycles for managers traveling around large warehouses, distribution centers, etc. I believe some can tow little trailers, too, which is probably handy if you need to get a batch of parts from here to there.

    3. Lexi Vipond*

      I used to occasionally have to go with a heavy trolley to the other end of our loooing corridor to get to the lift to Stores – the easiest way was to give it a good shove and then jump on the back!

        1. Not Tom, Just Petty*

          LOL. Looing Hall. I was thinking that must be a very British term for out American restroom!

  11. Eldritch Office Worker*

    When I came to my current role my desk was full of:

    *Used dental flossers
    *Dirty silverware
    *An entire drawer of ketchup packets???
    *Dozens of pens, but ONLY blue pens. Not necessarily odd, but I learned this was a BIG sticking point
    *Some actually very cute binder clips which I have been happy to steal

    *And PILES of hard copy employee records. The kicker is that there was a story surrounding that. Apparently when this person (HR Director) left, they left all of these confidential employee files in a huge pile on their desk, in their unlocked office. I assume as some kind of F-You on their way out the door. They were eventually noticed and locked in a drawer – but there was also no reason for this person to be keeping hard copies to begin with.

    Now I have to go through all of these files and make sure there are in fact digitized copies for anything that falls within the compliance window for keeping records, which I have admittedly been procrastinating.

      1. Eldritch Office Worker*

        Unfortunately we’re going to be moving office buildings so I have to do *something* with them, but that has crossed my mind.

    3. Mentally Spicy*

      Now I wish I worked in your office because I LOVE doing that kind of thing. It satisfies my love of order, tidiness and nosiness!

        1. Mentally Spicy*

          You know it might be worth asking around your office to see if anyone else wants to and can take the job on. It’s entirely possible you’ll find someone like me who loves to tackle projects like that.

      2. NotJane*

        Yes! I started my current job a couple of years ago and the office is in a 100 year old house with a basement filled with all kinds of random stuff. I’ve been working my way through everything and tossing, recycling, and organizing. My boss keeps apologizing that I’m having to deal with it but I’m legit having a blast!

  12. spinyechidna*

    I was once cleaning out an old lab, and along with the expected barely closed chemicals kept haphazardly on shelves right next to things they were explosively reactive with, there was a lot of surprisingly quite radioactive material, also kept haphazardly on shelves in containers that did not block radiation.

    1. spinyechidna*

      The solution, incidentally, was to stop me, an undergrad, from cleaning it up, as undergrad safety was something they took seriously-ish, heavy on the ish, and just make grad students do it.

      1. Silver Robin*

        ah yes, because as everyone knows, immunity to radioactivity is bestowed during orientation to grad school.

        that sucks, I hope folks were okay

        1. spinyechidna*

          Immunity to risk of being sued, more like. I could just quit my summer job; they needed to do it to actually have a lab to do their research in. (I will say that, as a department, chemistry was remarkably casual about lab safety in a way that the biochemists found appalling.)

          1. MassMatt*

            When I was in college someone told me about a chemistry class where they were told to use mouth pipettes (very old fashioned, I know) to add some obscure ingredient. Someone asked if this was hazardous. The professor rolled his eyes dramatically and said he’d have to look it up. It was very toxic.

            Hey prof, how ’bout looking that up BEFORE you tell the class to inhale it?

            1. I Have RBF*

              As a former laboratory worker I have a severe cringe reaction to pipetting anything by mouth. Pipet bulbs are less than $10 on $A, and often multiple for that amount. (Yes, some labs had different color bulbs for different stuff, or they were marked with sharpies.)

            2. JustaTech*

              Once in my career I have seen someone mouth pipette. It was out, not in, and she was trained in the Soviet Union, but I still hit the roof.
              (It also wasn’t particularly hazardous, just gross.)

      2. WeirdChemist*

        Ha, in my lab in a similar situation the grad students put their foot down and made EH&S deal with it. They ended up needing hazmat suits to be able to stand being in there for more than a few seconds…

        But seriously, cleaning out old labs is always an adventure! Some of the things I’ve found:
        -Several containers labeled with a radioactive hazard (not stored shielded)
        -A container of europium, unopened (for those without scientific backgrounds, it’s a very obscure element that I’ve never seen used for anything and is likely super expensive)
        -An azide that had been carted along for at least two building moves (for those unaware, azides are explosive)
        -Several containers where whatever was inside had corroded the label off
        -An absurd number of bottles where the labels were made on a typewriter
        -Just the tiniest, most useless glassware. A 1mL erlenmeyer is adorable, but what on earth could it be used for??

        1. Chas*

          For growing 200 microlitres of bacteria?

          But I’ve recently had similar “adventures” cleaning out my old lab after my boss and animal-handling ex-coworker had both left. This included me having to deal with:

          -1/3 of a freezer that was full of frozen rat carcasses (thankfully wrapped up in several layers of tissue paper/bin bags)
          -A gallon of Picric Acid, which is a potential explosive if left alone long enough (we’d only needed 1 mL, but it was cheaper to buy the gallon bottle than the 100 mL bottle)
          -A large amount of Isoflurane (an anesthetic) that I’m certain wasn’t supposed to be stored in our lab, especially not in the random unlocked drawers I found it in.
          -My exboss’ habit of leaving razor blades and scalpels in random parts of his office.

          1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

            I know someone who came across a gallon container of picric acid that *had* been left long enough. She had to call the bomb squad.

            2. pandop*

              We ‘found’ some unexploded ordnance and had to call the bomb squad a few years ago.

              *we knew the item was there, we didn’t know it was unexploded …

          2. JustaTech*

            Why why why do people leave razor blades lying around?
            I have a junior lab coworker who is *terrible* about this, no matter how often I ask her to at least keep them on her cart.

          3. Curious*

            I’m not sure what you mean by “cheaper” — once you factor in the cost of disposal of hazardous materials? Doesn’t that cost $$$$$?

            1. Chas*

              Probably, but that money wouldn’t have come out of our research budget (it gets covered by money the Uni takes for general “indirect” costs), whereas the cost of buying it in the first place did. So my boss picked the option that was cheaper for him.

              1. Chas*

                And, just to be clear, it was a weird case where 100 mL cost something like £100, but 1 gallon from a different supplier cost £50. So he went with the £50 option even though I said “I don’t think we need that much, shouldn’t we get as little as possible because of the whole explosive thing?” while he was ordering it…

        2. Cease and D6*

          I mean, I bet the reason the tiny erlenmeyers were still there is *because* nobody was using them. Same reason really small shoes are preserved better historically than more standard sizes – if very few things fit in them, they don’t get used, and thus they don’t get broken.

          1. Vio*

            Also why there’s far more surviving suits of ceremonial armour that was only worn on special occasions than the stuff that got regularly bashed and slashed on battle fields.

        3. Accidental Itenerate Teacher*

          No idea other than possibly something in the oil & gas industries?
          Which I say only because I have inherited whole sets of adorable tiny glassware from my grandfather who was an oil field chemist for many years.
          We’re talking beakers, flasks, and graduated cylinders all for 10mL or less increments. I love them but have no idea what they were used for.

          1. Lady Lessa*

            I think that the tiny glassware items are cute. One that I took home (rather than have it trashed is a wide mouth measuring container.

            I also have similar horror stories about left over hazardous/unknown/both materials. In one case, the company was closing down, and I felt sorry for the folks who had to deal with it.

          2. Spooky Season*

            Check out the 5 story haunted dollhouse on The Bloggess site! I’ll bet there’s an eager market somewhere.

        6. Gumby*

          I feel like the 1mL erlenmeyer is firmly in decorative territory. I’m sure someone could make a nice necklace using it. Or it would work well in some sort of diorama.

        7. Worldwalker*

          I don’t know what it could be used for, but now that I know that 1ml Erlenmeyer flasks exist, I need to get one. Maybe a vase for two or three Tiny Bluets? (Houstonia pusilla)

        8. I Have RBF*

          I love tiny glassware! 10 ml beakers, 25 ml volumetric flasks, etc is so cute. Useless for most things, but cute.

        10. William Murdoch's Homburg*

          I found a couple of 1mL Erlenmeyers while cleaning out a drawer at work once. I gave them to my niece and she uses them with her dolls to play Science Barbie.

        11. vampire physicist*

          I don’t know what isotope the box had, but Eu-152 is a common calibration source for well counters in nuclear medicine! definitely needs to…not be left in a box though.

      3. Sara_H*

        Oh, I think I worked in a lab in the same university. The postdocs running the magnetics lab organized a clean-up day at the end of the year. Most of the lab focused on magnetic nanoparticles and thin films, but one guy was looking at magnetic materials in animal tissue (there’s still a hypothesis that migratory birds have tiny magnetic particles in their brain to help them navigate). So when I saw a box labelled ‘Semi-dead mouse’ I yelled in horror.
        (The researcher put the box back on the shelf because it would be wasteful to throw away equipment, so someone else got to find it the next year and have the same horrified reaction.)

        3. linger*

          Presumably computer equipment in this case (where “semi-dead” could be e.g. just one button working, or vertical but not horizontal scroll direction, therefore still potentially of some use in an emergency), rather than the previous entries about literal rodents.

    2. Elitist Semicolon*

      My old lab found vials with labels that looked like they were from the 1920s identifying the contents as uranium salts. Also a vial in our -80º freezer that was labelled “HIV,” though we think that one was a prank.

      2. Worldwalker*

        I collect uranium glass and I’m also interested in early 20th century medical quackery. The combination is why I own a Revigator, which is basically a water jar that you’re supposed to let your drinking water sit in overnight to accumulate “healthful radium energy.” It’s lined with crushed uranium ore (urananite, I believe)

        Naturally, I also own a Geiger counter. Portable, pancake tube, worryingly fragile but, unlike the more common ones, it can pick up alpha as well as beta and gamma. I put that inside my Revigator to check the radiation level.

        Y’know, they could have just lined it with crushed Fiestaware!

        (incidentally, I’m ridiculously proud of the fact that my Revigator is nicer than the one the Oak Ridge museum has!)

      3. Quill*

        Or it could be someone’s initials… I have met people who would insist that making an acronym out of something like Henry Irving’s Virus is absolutely clear! No one could mistake it!

        (These people are not enjoyed by their labmates. For various reasons.)

        1. Generic Name*

          I worked in a lab that had various items of glassware with “BAD” written on it, so of course I didn’t use them, but wondered why they were still around. Finally someone explained that BAD was a former graduate student’s initials.

    3. PostalMixup*

      I was hoping to find a lab clean out thread! My graduate advisor had been a PI for 30 years. We played “which is older, the grad students or this bottle of (insert chemical name here)?” We found a tiny vial of highly regulated, very poisonous neurotoxin rolling around in a fridge drawer. And there were 50 mL conicals with black widow and brown recluse spiders in the freezer, because apparently we kept them on hand to show the international students what to watch out for (our area has both).

      1. Worldwalker*

        My black widow spiders aren’t in my freezer; they’re in my back yard. And my crawl space. And once, in my front hallway. I also have brown widow spiders — I got a few pictures of a really dark one (so close to black that, before she laid eggs, I didn’t know which species she was) living under a bucket in my back yard. Her egg sacs were really cool, by the way — like a WWII naval mine, with the spikes and all. I assume her grandspiders are living out there now.

        Black widow bites are medically significant, yes, but they’re very unlikely to kill you. Definitely not a healthy adult. And they’re very, very rare. The neighbor’s dog is a greater threat. And there’s some (not conclusive) research indicating that brown recluses have been getting a bad rap for opportunistic infections.

        1. Quill*

          Yeah, I would not worry about dead ones at all, I would worry most about live ones with smaller animals, little kids, or out in the field (in case of an anaphylactic reaction. Or infection.)

    4. WeirdChemist*

      I thought of another one from a lab clean out:

      I found a bunch of ring stands/hot plates/etc that had once apparently belonged to the analytical chemistry teaching lab. Everything was labeled “ANAL CHEM”. Gave me a light giggle every time I saw it lol. I also found a hot plate that was decorated with fake wood paneling on the sides… was that really a design trend that needed to be reflected in our lab equipment?

      1. Worldwalker*

        I would feel compelled to make a pair of miniscule fuzzy dice and tape them onto the side of that hot plate!

      2. ChemCat9*

        Heheh! I’m an analytical chemist, and I have a few coworkers whose first language is not English. One in particular is senior and won’t listen to any suggestions…so he keeps sending out company wide emails with stuff about Anal Chem. Makes me giggle every time.

        Also loving all the lab cleanout stories. Spent the first few months at my new job going through our inventory and clearing out old chemicals. Only had the bomb squad called twice so far!

    6. Anonymous Scientist*

      Hooray, a lab related thread. Because as we all know, scientists are ridiculous hoarders.

      My lab took over another lab that had a cabinet full of unlabeled but full screw top jars. I attempted to get EH&S to take them, but they refused until I put content labels on them. I had no idea what the contents were and was not going to open them to find out, so I very carefully wrote Unknown Contents on all the stickers … at which point they were picked up.

      The next example I have is of a glass bottle that had an actual CORK in it. I always regret not taking that, because honestly, the PI would never have noticed and then I would have a bottle with a cork in it. It was something completely inert, so it wouldn’t even be dangerous to have around.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        EH&S accepting the “Unknown Contents” label is hilarious. I’m glad they did, though!

        1. Quill*

          It’s all about documentation. They get in trouble for assigning labels like “unknown” but if they can prove the people who initially ordered it didn’t know what it was…

      2. Worldwalker*

        Well, you could order a box of suitable bottles off Amazon, and a package of corks. Make some labels like “Vampire Powder” and they’d be great decor around this time of year.

    7. MassMatt*

      Several people I know who have worked in chemistry or biology labs have told me of badly stored chemicals. Unlabeled bottles, or bottles with the labels completely illegible, and maybe worst of all–bottles with crystals forming on them, showing that something in the cabinet is not even sealed.

      Nothing radioactive so far as I know, but in biology they use a lot of stains and reagents that are extreme carcinogens, nasty stuff.

      1. Alice in Hinterland*

        In grad school, my adviser warned me to be really careful opening a certain drawer in one of the cabinets and always use gloves if I took anything out of that drawer, which was where he was currently storing the pre-racked refills of micropipette tips. Apparently 20 years earlier he had been doing experiments involving giving crack to fruit flies — and it had been stored in an open tub in the drawer with a small scoop, so they just scooped out what they needed for a given experiment onto a stack of weighing paper squares. Some of the lab techs were not very careful about making a mess, it seems, so there were still traces of white powder showing up. I guess they’d also had a pretty wild party when they finished the experiment series. The early 80s must have been something to see…. Not sure why they didn’t just have the drawer cleaned out. Couldn’t that have contaminated our pipette tips? At least they were double-bagged!

    8. Ceanothus*

      Ah, I also found radioactive material, but it was C14 isotopes at a remote ecology lab. It’s been some years, I believe I also found a lot of weird sticky dregs in the back of the flammables cabinet where things had slowly evaporated over the last four decades, as well as some surprisingly well-preserved chloroform bottles from 1968.

      I also found several containers of a white granular substance with masking tape labels in Korean, which dated to a post-doc from a decade earlier. I copied down the labels and mailed my attempts at duplicating them to him so I could get the proper MSDS for disposal — it turned out it was table sugar for agar plates. This is the best outcome I have ever had in any game of lab “whack a mole”, and I love it forever.

      1. Flavor Mayor*

        A friend worked for EH&S at a university and they were tasked with cleaning out the lab of a chem professor who either retired or died (unclear) and found a liter bottle of THC.

    9. JustaTech*

      I once had to organize the cleanout of a large lab where the entire department had been laid off. To start, it was creepy, like they all left for lunch and never came back.

      And then it was incredibly frustrating, because there must have been 30 kits with all the important stuff used up and just a half bottle of a wash leftover. There’s *always* and extra half bottle of wash in those kits, so there is never a need to keep them from kit to kit.

      In the end it took a full day, 15 people, a full trash dumpster, a full recycling dumpster, and donations to two schools to clear out that room. We found a tube from 1995 in one freezer (kept it, we still might need it!), someone’s kid’s baptism certificate (returned it) and someone’s bank records (also returned) and a bunch of equipment that hadn’t been used since 1999 (because it was still in the autoclave bag labeled 10/6/99).

    10. The OG Sleepless*

      When we cleaned out an ancient barn on our farm, I found a dusty bottle of an injectable antibiotic that was banned for use in food animals decades ago. We ran a very tight ship so I’m reasonably sure it was never used after the ban, but finding it was jarring.

    11. Cedrus Libani*

      I once spent a summer working in a chemistry lab. My assigned desk came with a large bottle labeled “Cyanide” – no other bottles, just that one. Might have been a prank; more likely, someone didn’t want to deal with it, so they just plopped it on an empty desk and walked away. I left it there for the next person.

      Here’s a more dramatic story for the lab clean-out thread, though it was something the brand-new admin found in the hall. Specifically, it was in the doorway leading to the BSL3 (high containment facility for infectious disease work). She thought it might be important, so she picked it up and then sent out an email, saying that she’d found a vial in this doorway with such-and-such written on it and had put it on her desk.

      It was mine. Earlier that day, I’d cleaned out some of my old stuff from a freezer in that hallway, throwing away several large handfuls of cryo-vials, and I guess one of the slippery little rascals escaped. I went to claim it, but someone had already explained to the admin what was happening on the other side of that door…mostly Simian B, and if you haven’t heard of it, trust me you’d be crying too. I don’t scare easy, but I refused to go near the stuff, even suited and booted and ready to do my own BSL3-level work.

      (The lead scientist once told me that the high mortality rate was actually a good thing. “I’ve seen what happens to the survivors. They come back, but they’re not…themselves.” Oh HELL no. I don’t actually have a death wish. The stuff I worked with was treatable!)

      I apologized, and swore up and down that the vial was from the lab down the hall, nothing dangerous in there. It helped some. I also sanitized her desk, because I felt bad and I didn’t think she was entirely convinced. Hallmark doesn’t make cards for “I’m sorry that my carelessness caused you to contemplate your mortality”, but…maybe they should?

    12. Sequoia*

      I cleaned out a lab in a blood bank years ago, and found a collection of old blood smear slides, along with a vintage reusable glass syringe/metal needle set. The kind you might see in black and white horror films.

  13. Legislative assistant*

    In my senior year of high school, I was a page in the Maryland state legislature. The legislature usually only meets for 3 months a year and the page program meant that you worked there for two non-consecutive weeks during the winter/spring of your senior year.

    I was one of the pages in the first week of the programme that year, which meant we were there before the session opened and our first task was to clean out the desks on the floor of the legislature, which had been sitting empty for the 9 months since the previous session ended.

    Most of what we found was reams and reams of paper, mainly copies of bills from the last session, which could go straight in the trash because even if they were debated again, they would be re-printed.

    But when we were really unlucky, we found lunches that had been sitting for 9 months. The sandwiches had mostly mummified and weren’t too bad, but the fruit was disgusting. It smelled awful and had usually oozed all over the paperwork around it . Yuck.

    In my second week, I got to do more normal stuff, like helping out at committee hearings, but the first couple of days were rough.

    1. Madtown Maven*

      Wait–the Maryland legislature is only in session 3 months of the year? Huh. Now I have to go look up my state’s session calendar!

      1. Mid*

        Most state legislators, in my experience, have other jobs, as a lot of them only meet for part of the year, and sometimes it’s still part time work even when they’re in session. Off the top of my head, I’d estimate the average to be around 4 months. Arkansas and Wyoming are the shortest ones I know off the top of my head, they meet for a month. And then four states meet every other year (Montana, Nevada, North Dakota and Texas) and only in odd numbered years, though I *believe* they all have provisions to call special sessions if necessary. Some states do meet closer to year round, or fully year round (off the top of my head, Michigan, Massachusetts, New York, and Wisconsin all have regular year-long sessions, and probably a few other states that I don’t know.)

        So, there are likely very many interns doing some very gross desk clean outs across the US every year! Especially if their state Capitol buildings are like the ones I’ve experienced, and lack good climate control during the summers.

  14. MrsPitts*

    I teach high school science. One time I took over for a teacher who had not cleaned out the classroom. There are lots of interesting things, but there were mashed potato flakes and almost every drawer! Not sure which lab involved that.

    I currently belong to an AP chemistry Facebook group. A running gag is when someone finds a random and unusual piece of glassware, it is always a “b0ng”

    1. Bunch Harmon*

      At my first teaching job, I took over a middle school science position for someone who was retiring midyear. She left boxes and boxes of supplies, which I slowly worked through. There was so much mouse poop! It made sense when I got to the bottom box which had the remnants of a bag of rice. I don’t know what lab that was for either, but it was gross.

    2. Kay*

      At a guess, an “identify the mysterious white powder” lab. Although you would probably want sugar, flour, etc stored in the same place… It would probably be a OK substitute for starch. Maybe fake snow for classroom decorations if they loathed the school? Or a strange pregnancy craving?

  15. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

    I feel cheated- the most interesting things I’ve found are a coating of chocolate pudding from an exploded cup that no one- presumably for years- decided to clean and, in a different desk, all the shavings from the lottery tickets the previous occupant had stratched off over his drawer. I knew he was playing the lotto at his desk- I just didn’t know how many tickets he was going through. (Also, why over his drawer and not over the garbage can? Mystery for the ages since the reason I was cleaning out his desk was that he passed away.)

    1. Not on board*

      My mom used to buy tons of scratch tickets and almost 30 years ago when my mom gave me her old car (which was full of stuff as she drove around a lot for work) my then boyfriend helped me clean it out – he kept asking me what all the “confetti” was. I was trying not to laugh because it was just scratch ticket shavings. We also found close to $50 in change too.

  16. Attic Wife*

    I found almost $400 in cash along with binders and binders of printed emails as well as a folder of printed Facebook messages to another person in the department from what appeared to be an old flame declaring his unrequited love. That was a super fun day.

    1. Construction Safety*

      I didn’t find them, but the guy who moved into the office across the hall from me found them in the top pen/pencil, paperclip drawer.

      1. A. Nonymous*

        Apparently this is a (really weird and disgusting) thing with some people? I cleaned out a desk in my area once and the top drawer had piles, as in years of nail clippings.

      2. Annie*

        I can provide some wild guesses: superstition, self-soothing, each piece not QUITE large enough to need the trash can right away, can’t step away from desk every time the impulse strikes so desk drawer it is…

    3. ReallyBadPerson*

      People are so weird about nail clippings. I once witnessed a woman clip her toenails in the gym locker room, then gather them into a pile and deposit them on a bench. Where people sit to put on their shoes. Not-poker-faced me made a not-poker-face and got out of there.

  18. John*

    At an old job, I inherited the PC previously used by a very highly paid executive. He ran a trading desk, and that’s where the big money is.

    He’d left all these curious files, which I opened to find correspondence to various personal vendors (youth camps, etc.) in which he was making excuses for delayed payments. This was over the course of years, so it’s clear this was likely an intentional pattern. And the guy was bringing home millions!

    1. Strive to Excel*

      That’s an orange flag for fraud. You see that pattern when someone steals a check then uses the next check to pay for the expenses the first check would have covered. And so on and so forth.

      If an auditor saw that next step would be to check that the internal books were really showing that payments had been delayed.

      1. Frank Doyle*

        I think “personal vendors” means that these were payments in his personal life, not business expenses.

        1. MassMatt*

          That someone is delaying personal vendor payments is a red flag that they may be doing the same with company payments, especially if the notices were kept at work.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        Samuel Vimes’ “boot” theory: the way rich people stay rich is by having to spend less money.

        1. C*

          That’s related but in this case I think they mean that people stay rich by not paying at all, rather than by buying quality.

  19. Eloise*

    A tiny, perfect snake skeleton, stuck to a glue trap that had been pushed back behind a stack of boxes and books who knows how long ago.

    2. dulcinea47*

      I also saw a tiny snake (not alive, but not a skeleton) stuck on a glue trap in the depths of the library. Hate glue traps so much.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        A tiny snake got stuck to a piece of tape that had drifted free from a box in my garage once. I spent an hour getting him off with olive oil and a toothpick and then set him free. He was not appreciative, lol.

        Glue traps are of the Devil.

  20. Medium Sized Manager*

    We let a contractor go pretty early in his contract because he were..the worst. Fell asleep in training, visibly checked out, regularly late, and (the final straw) incredibly rude to one of the trainers to the point that she cried. Since the agency notified him after he left for the day, he didn’t clean out his own desk, but he wasn’t there long and didn’t appear to have brought anything.

    A few months later, we were shuffling desks and noticed his was locked. Upon opening, we found a second cell phone and noticed weird white stains on his chair. There’s probably a much more tame answer, but the running joke was that he was a drug dealer who didn’t want to admit he left a burner phone behind.

    2. dontbeadork*

      Drugs would have been much tamer than where my mind went.

      I hope you very thoroughly cleaned and sanitized that desk. Eeew.

    3. Martin Blackwood*

      I hope the nature of the stain (eg, powder rubbed into fabric as opposed to…a liquid spill) sheds more light into why you assumed drug dealer. maybe im sheltered, but i dont know of any drugs that are white and liquid

  21. AnonymousFormerTeacher*

    When I was a brand new, 23 year old chemistry teacher, I got a job at a nearby high school – my parents’ alma mater (but not mine). The classroom I was assigned had been the classroom they had taken upper level science courses in 30+ years before.

    I cleaned out 14 taxidermized animals, papers that spanned four decades *with my parents’ names*, and had to call the EPA for guidance, who sent hazmat, once when I found concentrated acids that had been stored improperly for who knows how many years. I cleaned out and got rid of 14 cabinets. I also had desks fall through the ceiling (didn’t hit anybody, thankfully) that he had put in the drop ceiling that no one knew were up there.

    That whole first year was a surprise every time I opened a drawer in that room.

    1. Selina Luna*

      In my first teaching job, I also found extremely old assignments. These were from the 1960s, in a filing cabinet that couldn’t have been made earlier than 2000, in a building built in 1992. This means that the teacher who had my classroom before the teacher who had my classroom before me had moved these old files at least twice (and more realistically, at least six times). The only thing I can think of is that this school district was started in 1962 (I looked it up once), and this teacher kept these assignments for sentimental reasons from when the district began.

    2. Our Business Is Rejoicing*

      Similar to what happened during organic chem lab during university. The lab room was shared between numerous sections of the class, but we all got our own drawers. I opened mine during our first session to find that it was literally oozing. It turns out that in the drawer two drawers above mine, someone had stored some of the high-molar sulfuric acid (I think it was 18M). And then it had spilled and/or eaten through the container and seeped down into the lower drawers. By the amount of damage in my drawer three levels down, there had been quite a lot stored. (As I found out later, the person who had had that drawer had likely withdrawn from the class because cleaning out your drawer was supposed to happen on the last day and only clean glassware was supposed to be in there for the next student.)

      After I did laundry, the pants I was wearing the day we found the drawer were full of little holes.

    3. MigraineMonth*

      I nominate “desks falling through the ceiling” as one of the most dramatic ways to find something left by your predecessor!

  22. rita*

    We had an intern who drove the whole office crazy with his elitist behavior. After his time with us had ended, we needed to look for info on the computer he had been using, and we discovered a folder full of dozens of pics of ancient nude male statues. One of my coworkers pointed out that *of course* even his porn would be pretentious…

      1. MassMatt*

        “The glory that was Greece!”

        When I was in junior high our class went on a field trip to a museum pretentious young me (now I’m older but if anything even more pretentious) had visited many times.

        The teacher noted how the ancient Greeks liked to illustrate athletes, and pointed to a vase showing “wrestlers”. I said “they’re not wrestling. See, in this scene the man is giving the ‘youth’ a chicken. Then in the next scene…” Man, the teacher could not have gotten more flustered. “MOVING ON!….”

  23. BookBabe*

    once had an intern leave and when we cleared out his desk, one of the drawers contained a load of contracts he should have mailed out months ago, buried under a pile of candy wrappers and several odd socks?

  24. Hohundrum*

    Dead birds, insects in jars, strange chemicals, and old Petri dishes with unnerving labels and a lot of growth.

    but I work at a science center, which transforms this list from “mildly interesting” to incredibly mundane

      1. Rose Selavy*

        It’s so much more boring than you’d think!

        My former office… from the curatorial position I left earlier this year… just had loads and loads of my predecessors’ files since 1988. Turnover was apparently a problem for 30+ years (gah!)

        1. allathian*

          Oh well, at least these predecessors didn’t keep notes in an ancient language only they understood at the institution…

  25. Panicked*

    I was doing a deep clean of a desk I was assigned and found a note taped to the underside of a drawer. It was basically a burn book of every employee the person who had my desk prior worked with. It ended with “Whoever reads this, you’re welcome!” I agreed with most of it, honestly.

    1. a good mouse*

      I would never have thought to check the underside of a drawer. I’ll have to keep that in mind for the next time I’m clearing out a space!

    3. Silver Robin*

      Sometimes that kind of thing is the most useful knowledge you can impart to a new person, but there is no politic way of doing that. Sometimes if you know who your replacement is going to be and can maybe get a minute to chat outside the office. Or if you can get a trusted coworker to give folks a run down/warning ahead of time. I have been that trusted coworker, but this is a rare situation.

      I also have not had an assigned desk that I knew my successor was going to get. So not even sure I could leave a note on the underside of a drawer.

      All that said, under the drawer is clever and I am glad it worked!

    4. Ally McBeal*

      In high school I tucked a note into the binding of my calculus textbook listing all the ways our calculus teacher could be distracted from the curriculum. Our class had methodically tested his patience throughout the year and found a particular weakness for that awful “Christmas Shoes” song – we wasted an entire class period listening to him rant about the many reasons he hated it. It was glorious.

  26. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

    I took over a desk from somebody who was a contract marketing/sales guy. I found the most ridiculous bundle of business cards. All sorts of organizations who could never conceivably be a customer of ours (we were an IT contractor for the Pentagon – there were cards from a half-dozen dry-cleaners). I guess the guy just reflexively grabbed and squirreled away every business card he ever saw.

    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      If he has to dress less casually, the dry cleaners makes sense. He probably got suits dry cleaned.

      But some people used to exchange business cards as a Thing.

    2. My Brain is Exploding*

      OK, so there’s a book I read long ago where the main character picks up random business cards all the time and then – I think s/he is a detective – uses them while detecting, handing them out and pretending to be the person whose card it is.

    3. allathian*

      Some people collect business cards as a hobby, regardless of how useful they’re likely to be. One of my coworkers is really sad that they’re going out of fashion because her adult son who’s on the spectrum loves to collect them. He went so far as to learn Japanese and get a job with a company that does a lot of business in Japan, at least partly because business cards and the rituals associated with exchanging business cards are very important there.

  27. stelms_elms*

    We cleaned out some cabinets in 2018 where we found the 1987 edition of the Professional Secretary’s Handbook, a package of unopened overhead transfer sheets for a projector that was long gone, and framed pictures of our college campus from 50 years ago which were actually pretty cool.

    1. ferrina*

      I would take the overhead transfer sheets. You can still project things with just a decent flashlight!

      2. Freya*

        Attach them to anything that’s white and you have a whiteboard. A tasklist underneath one becomes a reusable tasklist.

    2. Buni*

      I acquired two full boxes of those OHP sheets – they’re great for kids’ crafts (relevant to my job), we’ve done a lot of cheat’s stained glass pictures.

    3. Worldwalker*

      Given the date, the overhead sheets might be computer-printable. If they are, model builders would be all over them. You can still buy them, though they’re spendy. I doubt if any of them go for overhead projectors anymore — but they have so many craft uses!

  28. UpstateDownstate*

    I’ve got one more to add but the other way around.

    I was at a new job for a few years when someone reached out from my previous employer. Turns out I’d left a whole bag of personal items in the communal closet that they found while renovating. They were kind enough to messenger the bag over to my new job and out of that bag I pulled out a bank account booklet (what are those even called?) that I had when I was a teen! Think small town local bank. What a trip down memory lane that was!

    2. skunky_x*

      I used to work in estate management, and once had to go to a bank to get the passbook updated. It had been so long since it had been done, it took half an hour and we filled an entire book in the process. Made a calendar note to do it quarterly after that point!

    3. Lady Lessa*

      Being a 3rd generation pack rat, when we were cleaning out my folk’s house before the estate auction and then selling the house, I found some used checks that were done BEFORE the checks had printed numbers on them.

  29. Helen*

    I had to clean out the back storage room of a recently-acquired tech startup when they were moving to a new office after several years in their pre-acquisition space. Among the boxes and boxes and boxes of personal items from long-gone employees there was … a hot dog roller. (Previously used, never cleaned.)

  30. Black_Cat_mama*

    I work for a non profit that has been in the building since at least 1978. We have started to do deep cleans and so far have discovered:
    – A pair of mannequin legs
    – A black and white wooden sign that says “I’ll have a Cafe Mocha Vodka Xanax Latte to go, please.
    – A box of bottles of red wine, gin, and beer.
    – A box of resumes for the Executive Director’s position from the 90’s
    – 6 sewing machines
    – A tape of the sewer of the org
    – So, so many floppy discs.
    – Creepy dolls face down in the back corner of the basement
    And a lot more. Today is cleaning day and I expect to find more.

    2. coachfitz13*

      I’m almost afraid to ask, but what is on the sewer tape? And do you mean “sewer” like wastewater from the toilet or “sew-er” as in “one who sews”?

      1. Black_Cat_mama*

        It was a VHS of the sewer line. I personally do not have a VCR so luckily I will never know what our sewer pipe looks like.

      2. Unkempt Flatware*

        ha! Didn’t even think of it since there were references to sewing. Footage of a sewage scoping!

      3. Paint N Drip*

        the close proximity to sewing machines threw me off, but I assume plumbing sewer like the pipes of the building

      4. MyToastLeftMe*

        As someone who works in the wastewater/sewer industry, I would imagine it is a tape of a video inspection of the sewer pipe/lateral that conveys sewage from the building to the public sewage collection system.

      1. ThursdaysGeek*

        I once worked for a city, and I watched a black and white video that was taken going down a sewer pipe, to check the condition of the pipe. So while I’m also curious what that means, I know what my mind came up with!

      2. Bossy*

        Maybe sew-er? As in seamstresses. Just following the clues lol
        Meanwhile this made me lol “I’ll have a Cafe Mocha Vodka Xanax Latte to go, please.” sign

        1. Season of the Witch*

          This is why I have updated my lexicon to ‘sewist’ for someone who sews. Non-gendered and much less ambiguous. (Thanks Charlie Nebe, for calling it to my attention, though some others before her may have started it.)

          1. MigraineMonth*

            The Ankh-Morpork Seamstresses’ Guild isn’t interested in changing their name (but none of their seamstresses own needles or know how to sew).

            1. linger*

              True, an early survey turned up precisely one needle among the lot of them, but the Guild is later described as having one somewhat innocent member who specialises in clients needing wardrobe repairs. Especially popular with widowers.

    4. IndyDem*

      Creepy dolls face down in the basement? And you are willingly going back there on Halloween to do more? I’d call out today.

    5. Charlotte Lucas*

      Can you tell us in general what kind of work your nonprofit does? This is sounding like the old game of coming up with the strangest combination of items you could bring through a grocery checkout.

    6. Ally McBeal*

      Not weird, just fun: When the nonprofit I worked at was shutting down (thanks, Specific Political Party, for decades of deliberate underfunding of the public school system!) a few of us were tasked with cleaning out the closets. We ran continuing-ed programs for principals, so in the closet we found some old sweatshirts from many years ago with a curious inscription under the logo: “The Snow-It-Alls.” My best guess is that there was a big blizzard that year (which would’ve been extremely unusual for the Southern state we lived in, so it probably mucked up their program and/or related travel) and, principals being principals, their cohort came up with the design as an inside joke. I still have one of those sweatshirts, along with a hat MY principals made just for me with “it’s the PRINCIPAL of the thing” – again, an inside joke because they knew I am a grammar obsessive.

  31. Jackalope*

    In the back of a drawer I found an old screen cover for computers from the 1980s. This was decades later. How it came to be there is a mystery, since the cabinet itself would have been made well past the date when the computers were obsolete.

    1. MigraineMonth*

      Never underestimate the ability of people to move useless junk from one location to another.

    2. Charlie Croker*

      Wandering slightly off topic but germane to this comment:
      I was once (for legit reasons not because I am a master criminal) in a vault in the Bank of England. Underground, no windows, very solid with huge thick door etc. There were various cabinets etc in it including a large tall safe, the size of a big wardrobe, looking to have been made in the first half of the twentieth century. My host pointed out that there’s no way that could ever have fitted through the (only) door…

  32. Ducky*

    This is a cute one. About two months ago I lost a team member that left for another job. She was a delight. Someone had taken on an innocent office prank of hiding very tiny ducks everywhere. They were multicolored “rubber duckie” style ducks that fit on the tip of your finger. They were often on top of bulletin boards, water fountains, mundane places but they usually brought a smile.

    She was very reserved but always nice and positive. When I opened her drawer to clean out I found the entire bag of the ducks. I had to send her a text to let her know she had been outted as the duck prankster.

    2. dulcinea47*

      this must be a thing, b/c we have some of those ducks around here too. A coworker gave me one but I’ve also seen them sitting in random out of the way corners.

    5. Chocoholic*

      We have a duck prankster in our office too – they are everywhere. I think I know who it is, but that person won’t confirm or deny.

    6. Maotseduck*

      We have a duck prankster in our office. We all know who she is, and she switches up the ducks for seasonal things. I have an assortment of Halloween figures (pumpkin, skull, witch hat) as well as two glow in the dark soot sprites on my desk along with a couple of ducks

    7. Elan Morin Tedronai*

      I love the story!

      But as I’ve been on AAM for the past 8 years, I was so scared when I saw ducks were starting to show up…

  33. a good mouse*

    I had a teammate with a desk in our shop area, and he was so protective of tape measurers. He never wanted to loan any out, even if you were going to use it within his eye line and promised to give it back. He wasn’t so protective with any other equipment. After he retired I helped clean out his desk, and he easily had 15 tape measurers in there! Made me laugh.

    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      I can kind of see this. Tape measures can get stretched or damaged more easily than you think. And then there’s the flexibility component, based on what you need to measure.

      1. allathian*

        Yes, this. We have at least a dozen tape measures, and my husband can never find the one he wants for a particular task. If I need to measure something, I’ll grab the first one I see.

  34. KareninHR*

    Not only did we discover multiple gallon-sized jugs of Hawaiian punch that were left in an employee’s desk drawer, we also discovered the cause of the ant problem we had been having in the office. Evidently the jugs had leaked, and the bottom of the drawer was completely soggy/caving in.

    1. allathian*

      Yuck! But just how big are the desk drawers if there’s room for more than two gallon-size jugs?

  35. ajisaokay*

    I’ve found a bunch of “why was this kept” outdated policies and procedures (some librarians have issues throwing things away) but I think my favorite was a box of summer reading pizza coupon prizes that were never claimed and had expired like 10 years prior.

    I also found a pretty excellent mechanical pencil that had that picture of Dwight Schrute’s face peaking through the blinds all over it.

  36. Corvus Corvidae*

    My new coworker got their laptop and realized one of the keys wasn’t working. They pried off the key and found a huge nail clipping jammed under it.

  37. It Ain't Me Babe*

    My manager was fired. When we cleaned out their cubicle, we found a two foot tall cardboard photo cutout of her manager’s head.

  38. Baska*

    When I first started my position at a small non-profit, I discovered a folder of cheques and cash that were supposed to go to our umbrella organization for a special collection they’d arranged about 7 months prior. All the cheques were stale-dated and I had to contact every single donor to ask them to reissue, which was quite anxiety-provoking for my first month on the job! All told, the donations were worth about a thousand dollars, and they’d just been sitting, unsecured, in a random drawer in my office for half a year, and likely would have continued to languish there forever if I hadn’t taken over the role.

    1. Harper the Other One*

      I didn’t discover these personally but was involved in the discovery of the opposite – about $50K of stale cheques a non-profit had issued to pay bills. The payments had all been recorded in the books but the cheques had never been sent out. We had been brought in as external accounting support and that discovery really should have tipped me off what a clusterfudge that contract would be.

  39. Gabs*

    After a long-term employee left, we were cleaning out her desk and found a printed out brochure with tips on “How to Find a Man”, “How to Keep Your Man Happy” and some others that were… definitely not a good use of the company printer lol.

  40. Former Retail Lifer*

    I worked at a huge old department store that had been there since 1909. Didn’t ever find anything that old in a desk, but, in 2001, I found some stuff from the early 1980s in a desk in a no-longer-used section of the building. A co-worker and I found a desk with a woman’s work ID, some big plastic hoop earrings and bangle bracelets, a notepad, and all of the expected office items ready for her the next day at work. It was like she left one day and never came back.

    Unrelated, that department store had walled-off sections that were inaccessible to the public that had so many cool, untouched relics: a bar from the 1900s, a soda shop from the 1950s, a restaurant from the 1980s, and merchandising props and holiday decorations scanning the decades.

    1. Poison I.V. drip*

      When I was in junior high working as a stagehand one day I had to go to the local department store to pick up some donated props. I had been to that store hundreds of times and never knew that it had an entire stage and small auditorium. It had long since been closed off

      1. ferrina*

        Right? Was it a Hallmark ending where she got to live a happy life and never return to work, or was it something more sinister? I’m going to choose to believe the former.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          I think the most likely explanation is she said, “Screw that job, I’m not going back there!” and considered the bangles and hoop earrings a small price to pay.

        2. Former Retail Lifer*

          This was at a downtown store, so the Hallmark ending with a flannel-wearing guy from the country is possible!

  41. silly little public health worker*

    This wasn’t a surprise I personally found in a desk, but I went to a women’s college and took a bunch of Greco-Roman archaeology classes. The reason that statuary is often missing noses, ears, arms, fingers, and other appendages is that it gets knocked off by wind, weather, or destruction of the building it’s in over time; such parts are sometimes found and can’t be identified as a part of a specific statue because of the general chaotic nature of unearthing archaeological materials.

    Anyway, I had a professor who kept severed statue penises in her desk drawer.

    1. Lab Boss*

      To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, “Once you get locked into a serious statue penis collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

      1. Jay*

        While there are a number of women’s colleges out this way and I cannot vouch for whether any of the others have faculty named Paula, I think I also know who you’re talking about lmao

  42. Sheworkshardforthemoney*

    Two findings from years ago. An employee finally retired after decades. Several months later his vintage Playboys were discovered in a filing cabinet. I don’t know what happened to them but they were all gone by the end of the day.
    The second one was worse and suffice to say the person was charged and convicted for what they had on their work computer. They were caught because they were lazy and stupid, they kept the diskettes in their desk and someone was looking for work-related files and found them.

    1. Paint N Drip*

      I would always rather evil people also be stupid, much easier to get to the conviction part

    2. MigraineMonth*

      I’m glad that person was convicted, but what an awful day at work for the person who grabbed the wrong diskette!

      1. Sheworkshardforthemoney*

        It was pretty bad. The person opened one file, took one look, and went to get their boss. Everyone was sent home, authorities were called to deal with it and long story short no one saw that co-worker again, the last we heard was he was convicted and jailed. After it was officially over, everyone went out and got very drunk and could finally discuss how it affected them because they saw this person every day and had no idea.

  43. Chocolate Teapot*

    I wasn’t there to witness it, but the woman sitting next to me and the company parted ways. Her desk was always covered in opened crisp packets, half-full bottles of pop and other detritus.

    My boss had to clear the little drawer cabinet we each had under our desk. He discovered that departed co-worker had been storing cheese in it.

    2. Mad Harry Crewe*

      In second grade there was a Terrible Smell in one part of the classroom that was eventually discovered to be the remains of a slice of american cheese in a student’s desk. I can’t remember what horrible name we came up with, but he was stuck with it for the rest of the year.

      1. Chocolate Teapot*

        And worse still, I think it was a soft cheese like brie or roquefort, rather than cheddar or emmenthal. Not that hard cheese would have made it better.

        I now refer to this as “The Cheese Incident”.

        1. allathian*

          Oh well, at least it wasn’t camembert or limburger… Sure, brie that’s been stored at room temperature for a while stinks, but those two stink more.

          1. mymotherwasahamster*

            Not for nothing does a song lyric live rent free in my brain:
            “The room reeks like a wedge
            Of Camembert
            Left out on a sultry day.”

  44. Deena Pilgrim*

    Out of grad school almost three decades ago, I had a contract job in a small-town museum that involved organizing and inventorying the collections. The museum had been moved around and temporarily shuttered and re-opened in a new building and never really thoroughly documented, so there was a LOT to be done.

    My coworker in this contract had arrived a few weeks before I did and had the task of clearing out the desk in the collections office, which housed a variety of papers, desk supplies, and an old, dead, flat toad that had obviously been peeled up off a parking lot somewhere.

    1. Deena Pilgrim*

      That was a trip of a job, really. The former curator had been understaffed—they were the only employee for much of the time, I believe—and was in the habit of leaving notes about project to be done, not in a desk or binder or file where they might be useful as guidance and scheduling work, but with the box or object they applied to.

      Such as a large box crammed full of stamps that had been shoved back behind other boxes, with a note that read something like “Needs to be organized. A god project for someone.” We found a note under a bird mount on display that read “Where is the tag for this??”

      And then there were the multiple tall lockers of 1980s-era summer dresses that had presumably been purchased or donated as one giant lot. The curator had gone through each and every one, rated them by some sort of criteria, and left a note on each that read either:

      Summer Dress
      Useless Summer Dress
      Mostly Useless Summer Dress

      We never figured out what made for a mostly useless summer dress.

      2. ferrina*

        I love the misspelling here: ” A god project for someone.”
        I guess that would have been a Herculean effort?

        1. Deena Pilgrim*

          It was! We weren’t even sorting it that much–we counted the stamps as part of the inventory, so we sorted them into piles by nation and then into smaller divisions that seemed to make sense, counted them, then stashed them in acid-free bags we labelled by those divisions and subdivisions. In my memory it took a week, but I think it only felt like a week. I believe for purposes of overall statistics we counted the collection as one object, otherwise the number of objects in the entire museum might have been doubled.

      3. FellowBeanCounter*

        I made a copy of a museum memo I once found that had conditions inserted between the normal “good – fair – poor” ratings, including “hideous – useless – stupid – disgusting”.

    2. Paint N Drip*

      Okay a lot of these have me giggling but flat toad that had obviously been peeled up off a parking lot somewhere is going to stay with me

      1. Season of the Witch*

        It really is time for a rendition of “Oh, Tom the Toad (Why did you jump into the road?)”, to the tune of, “Oh Tannenbaum”, as only the minds of 8-year-old boys can make it up… (a long ago camp project for the group of younger brothers of Girl Scouts whose parents were busy with their older sisters)
        [Sample verses in an Open Thread upon request only]

        1. Georgia Carolyn Mason*

          I have a family member who found or made up a joke version of “On the Road Again” that included the line “on the road again…just got squashed flat like a toad again…” Literally hadn’t thought about that in 30 years until today!

    1. J. random person*

      Eww, yeah, I once got the office of someone who wore tons of makeup and I had a major phone cleaning job.

    2. The Original K.*

      We had one of those except it was pancake makeup. We wondered how she could hear put of it because it was so caked on. Gross.

  46. Chairman of the Bored*

    When cleaning out a random long-unused desk my wife found a coffee mug that featured a dabbing rainbow unicorn in front of the company logo.

    She had never seen it before, and neither had anybody she asked about it. From the image, printing, and info on the bottom of the mug it looked like it was a custom one-off design that an employee had made for themselves vs something that was distributed by the employer.

    Obviously, she snagged this mug from the scrap bin and made it into her day-to-day coffee cup.

  47. J. random person*

    File drawer with a significant amount (maybe a couple of bags’ worth) of sunflower seed shells.

  48. Bird Lady*

    At my first museum job, straight out of grad school, I was assigned a storage closet for event props, catering equipment, and our beer/ wine/ snacks for donor events. It had clearly not been cleaned in many years, and was so full and disorganized it was impossible to close the door. I went in one weekend, with my mom, to clean it out and spend some time with a parent I had not had a lot of one on one time with due to working and school. Was super excited about the day and very energized to clean up something that was irritating me.

    But then we found the gallon-sized ziplock bag of human hair. No explanation, no label, nothing. Somehow someone stacked it above the cans of lighter fluid, which seemed to us at the time the only logical place to store a gallon of human hair.

  49. The Smile on a Dog*

    We could not figure out why it was so difficult to eradicate our fruit fly problem. A few months later we discovered one of our team members had taped a banana underneath a co-worker’s desk as a joke. It was black and fuzzy and shriveled up in to nothing. Team member (a good guy) was later fired (unjustly, imo) for something unrelated and was delighted to hear it had taken so long for the banana to be found.

  50. even more anonymous than usual*

    When assigned to clean out old files: An angry love letter from one of my bosses to the other, including reference to a terminated pregnancy, dated before 2000, ON COMPANY LETTERHEAD. I quietly re-filed that one in the back of the drawer.

    1. Hotdog not dog*

      I once had an executive who used to ask me to type his love letters to various women he was seeing on company letterhead. Including his title and my initials at the bottom as was customary for typewritten correspondence in those days. Just WHY??
      to clarify- part of my job was to type correspondence dictated into tape recorders by the executive in question. When I questioned the likelihood that a woman might not be impressed with a typed-by-a-secretary love letter he told me I just didn’t understand women. (spoiler- I am a woman.) I don’t know whether he ever found true love, but it certainly never happened while I was his EA.

      1. allathian*

        Kudos to you for dealing with that. I don’t have the attitude to be an EA for sure. I hope that the recipient of the letter dumped him and said something like “the love letter you had your secretary type for you was the last straw!”

        I have a very low tolerance of bullshit from bosses. One of my friends is an EA, and she really appreciates that the people she works for know the difference between an EA and a social secretary. Her line is that if it’s something that the bosses can use their company cards to pay for she’ll do the bookings, but she won’t risk getting convicted for credit card fraud by using their personal credit cards, even with their permission. Coffee runs are a gray area, she’ll grab coffees for them and they’ll venmo her the money, generally before she’s back at the office with the coffee.

        One of my great aunts was an EA in the 1970s and her job included booking hotel rooms for her boss and his affair partner. The irony is that boss’s wife was her best friend, and the boss knew it. He just figured that as the big boss and a man, he could do what he wanted and the subordinate women in his life would just have to live with it.

        The wife apparently suspected something was going on and asked her friend to look for proof. So she quietly collected evidence as she worked and when she got a new job, she took the proof to his wife who sued for divorce at a time when it wasn’t possible to get a no-fault divorce here. I would’ve loved to see the look on his face when he realized that the women he’d figured were less smart than him, as well as his subordinates either at work or at home (as he saw it) had plotted against him.

        Obviously she burned any chances of a great reference from the former boss, but she eventually retired from a position at a religious organization that saw her actions as proof of her personal moral values matching the organization’s values. But the story’s passed into family legend and it’s still being recounted at reunions some 50 years later.

  51. Lab Boss*

    My laboratory group was once moved into some vacant space that had been a lab once upon a time, then stood vacant for a few years. As we cleaned and inventoried the space, we discovered that there had not been a final hazardous materials pickup when the lab had been closed and the HazMat storage locker was full of flammable, carcinogenic, and all kind of other mean nasty stuff. Luckily nothing had leaked, but I still remember my heart dropping into my shoes when I realized what I might have just been exposed to.

    Not my own story, but my high school science teacher was often invited to clean out old facilities (at hospitals, colleges, etc.) before they were emptied out, to see if there was any used equipment worth bringing to the school. He stumbled over a roughly apple-sized chunk of solid sodium stored in oil. Why in oil? Because sodium reacts VIOLENTLY to water, and he had essentially found a bomb. In that case he got permission to throw the entire chunk into a lake for the class to see just how cool the reaction was (and yes, it was safe for the lake, the resulting sodium hydroxide is immediately diluted to oblivion in a large body of water).

    2. Another Jen*

      Not cleaning, but the fantastic teacher who used to teach the 9th grade “welcome to real science” class at our HS used to take a lovely spring day when the kids really didn’t want to be in the building, set up a blast shield on the practice field, and drop blocks of sodium in a 5 gallon bucket of water. I talked to him about it once, and he allowed that the blocks got larger and larger as the day went on…

      1. Lab Boss*

        Which was surely for science reasons and not just as he got progressively more and more bored as the day went on and wanted to see bigger kabooms…

    3. JustaTech*

      When a friend of mine was a grad studen his professor was moving labs, looking for somewhere to set up his very tall apparatus. Something about this thing meant it worked better the taller it could be.
      So they get this new lab and my friend goes, hey, this floor is weird. Turns out to not be a floor but a cover on a giant hole in the ground. Perfect for their apparatus!
      So my friend harnesses up in his climbing gear (safety first) and descends into the ~30 foot deep hole, which is perfect for their thingy. Then at the bottom he finds a cat skeleton.

      Asking around he find out that 20 years before there had been some “building cats” and one of them disappeared one day, and then there had been a bad smell. Poor kitty.

  52. OfficeRefugee*

    I found the previous desk user’s divorce decree. The next time this person visited the office (it was a friendly sort of place), I asked if he wanted it back. He did not.

    1. Charlotte Lucas*

      I can see why he might not want it, but I can also see where he might end up needing it.

  53. Poison I.V. drip*

    Thousands of fingernail clippings. Right in the top drawer. Apologies to anyone reading this while eating lunch.

  54. H.Regalis*

    I volunteered at a worker’s collective that has since closed. When we were cleaning out the building prior to shutting down, someone found a huge black trash bag (one of the thirty-three gallon ones) full of weed. It had been in the basement for at least twenty years and all the weed was completely dried out. It would have been worth quite a bit of cash when it was still smokeable, so I’m assuming whoever it belonged to had ended up in jail or something and that’s why they never came back for it.

  55. Sher*

    My mother worked for a very religious Mormon doctor. He and is wife were very condescending and rude. Not friendly at all. When he dropped dead, she was tasked with cleaning out his desk. She found TONS of porn and toys. She packed everything up with his other possessions and returned it all to his wife. She was evidently upset.

  56. Cheesymiddle*

    A coworker left, and another coworker and I were the only ones left to clean out her desk. Amongst a melange of personal effects, we found a hard copy of our reporting schedule with a handwritten missive at the top. It read, “I am a quesadilla.” It is now my go-to mantra during inane work situations.

    4. MissMaple*

      I love stupid stuff like this that sticks with you, always good for a random chuckle when you think of it

  57. MidManagement*

    A few months after one of my coworkers was fired, their desk was cleaned out for a new hire. Under the desk we found at least 50(!) post it notes with varying messages, including
    comments about women colleagues’ bodies, Bible verses, comments about hating management, and “do not get fired again”.

    Guess that didn’t work out for them.

  58. Pottery Yarn*

    When I first started at my current company, I spent a couple afternoons organizing our department’s storage closet that was in disarray. While going through everything, I found a couple business cards of an employee I’d never heard of stashed in different random boxes. I mentioned it in passing to my boss and apparently this employee had left the company several years prior and hid his business cards all over the building before his last day. It’s been well over a decade since his departure, and I’m certain there are still more business cards that haven’t yet been found.

  59. Beth**

    I once took over the desk of someone who was permanently orange from fake tan. They gave us wet wipe type things to clean the phone, keyboard etc. and I went through almost the whole container trying to get the orange residue off everything. The phone earpiece was a particular challenge, but even the keyboard was full of the stuff.

  60. JTM*

    Not necessarily weird but amusing…

    My first job out of grad school was running a materials evaluation lab for a defense contractor. I was hired to replace 2 people that were retiring and both had long tenures in that lab. About a year into role my labmate and I needed to move some new equipment into the lab, which required that we go through some old file cabinets & figure out what should be kept or tossed.

    I discovered file cabinets full of old memos and lab reports dating as far back as the 1950s – for context I was doing this lab cleanout in 2006! We double checked with legal but definitely didn’t need documents that old anymore and were able to dispose of them.

  61. Lab Boss*

    Are you accepting stories about what will EVENTUALLY be found when someone cleans out the space? Because my current company has… the Fungus Basement. Old laboratory space in a damp basement that became contaminated with fungal growth- it’s hard to sterilize fungus away and it wasn’t worth the risk of contaminating newer lab space, so an entire working lab got locked away in a lightless basement being slowly overgrown by The Fungus ™. We just heavily sealed all the doors and vents to keep it in there, and I can’t imagine what a horror movie set it’s turned into.

    3. Sheworkshardforthemoney*

      We had really really big rats invade our basement one summer because of road construction. Every day we trapped Rodents of Unusual Size. They freak me out and I sent someone else into the basement whenever we needed anything.

    4. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

      I had a coworker who had moved back into his deceased parents’ home. But he continued to pay rent on his apartment near work. (I think he went to the apartment only once a month to pay rent for at least the two years that I knew him.) He said his closet had gotten moldy and he had just taped it closed. He was afraid to give his notice because he’d have to pay to have it cleaned. He was also a hoarder (and I think his parents had been, too). I moved on to another city and five years later I heard that he had passed away. I always wonder what his landlord thought when opening up the closet.

      1. HBJ*

        … what? Surely paying to have it cleaned/forfeiting his deposit costs less than two years’ rent!

    5. Jay*

      This reminds me of an original fiction story I once read on ao3, I believe it was called Amber Skies… you guys may be creating a whole new life form down there

  62. TeacherTurnedNurse*

    Does it count that a kitten fell out of the ceiling of my office at my old university job?

    2. AnonAnon*

      That is an adorable problem!
      We had a baby racoon fall through the drop ceiling into someone’s office!!
      Maintenance set up a humane trap and locked his office. He had to get a ride home because his keys were still in there.
      It was a really, old gross building. If you sat in the cubicle area, you had to have a cover for your coffee because roaches would sometimes drop from the ceiling and land in the coffee.

    3. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

      We had kittens in the ceiling of our university library once but none of them fell through the ceiling (kittens and mama cat were all adopted). Hope your little kitty was all right after their fall.

  63. IHaveKittens*

    Not really weird exactly, but when I cleaned out the desk I inherited at a new job, I found an old model iPhone. No one knew who it had belonged to so I was told to keep it, if I wanted to. I charged it up and added my favorite Solitaire program. Now it is my little insomnia companion, lulling me back to sleep with a few games in the middle of the night.

    1. Blackberry*

      About 10 years ago, a found a Blackberry Curve and bought it from the company for $25 (the FMV at the time). For me, it was an upgrade from my flip phone. I have a 7+ year old iPhone now but still miss the Blackberry.

    2. MigraineMonth*

      I use things until they break, so I kept my first-gen iPad for at least 8 years (long after most people had upgraded). I brought it into Best Buy and one of the tech guys (yes, guy, and I’m a woman) confidently told that it was not, in fact, an iPad; it was clearly a generic tablet.

      Maintaining eye contact, I removed the case to show him the Apple logo. He did pivot, more-or-less gracefully, to admiring my bit of prehistoric technology and wondering if there were any museums that would want it.

      1. IHaveKittens*

        I did the same with my first iPad – a Gen 2, I think. I kept that thing going no matter how many new models were released. But then 4 years ago (just before we all went into lockdown) my former company had the annual holiday party and we were all given brand new iPads with the keyboard/cover accessory. So Max, my first iPad, went off to live with a friend of mine who uses it as her card reader in her store. I hope Max is happy.

      2. OldTech*

        Late to the party, but I’m posting from a first-gen iPad. It lives by my bed in case of insomnia, and mostly won’t load any other websites anymore.

  64. canuckian*

    My parents bought a corner store (yes, it was actually at a corner!) in 1979, which we lived above. The couple who’d had the store before us only had it a couple years and before that, it’d been owned by an older lady, whose father had owned the store before her–so from the 20s to the mid 70s.

    The owners immediately prior to us didn’t clean anything out. My parents were going through the items on the shelves for customers to buy and came across items, some perishable, that said: “Packaged this way because of war restrictions”–and since we’re in Canada, that means the Second World War.

    In my own working life, as a library tech in elementary schools: when my first school was combined with another school and we moved into a new building: in the boxes from the other school was an adult level, complete set of Encyclopedia Brittanica (in 2000!) There was a lot of other outdated junk that while it made it past the other school’s LT, didn’t make it past me.

    At what was, for one year, my third school: at least a half dozen globes, ALL outdated in the library. And TWO sets of encyclopedias from 1972 (woo hoo! Elvis is alive, there’s 2 Germanys and the USSR is still a thing, w00t!). When I went to through one set out, it had black mold on the inside covers.

    At my current smaller school–the previous employee was not trained library staff (she was grandmothered into our contract when three counties combined to make one school board 25+ years ago now), had interfiled all the picture books and chapter books. Also, books were on top shelves–about 7 feet high, that the kids needed to use stepladders to get to. There were books stamped RCAF Station *town name*–it hadn’t been a station since the late 50s. My favourite find there, though, was the road atlas of Europe from 1971 (in 2012). By the end of the first year, I had that collection weeded, picture books and chapters separate and no more step ladders.

    And in my current larger school, which I started at in 2009: when weeding I found, on the shelves for the students, a book from 1955 called “The Maliseet Indians of New Brunswick”. In the back room (which was in such a mess the Fire Marshal made us clean it or the principal would get a fine) I found: tiles for the library floor (gave those to the janitor/custodian), an ancient HUGE VHS videocamera in an Adidas bag, books from schools that had closed in 1979 and earlier. In the main part of the library were two metal magazine shelves–the kind that have a slanted front which lifts up for storage behind–4 shelves each, one was packed two deep/two high with chapter book donations–and very neatly organized, the other had as many picture and non fic books as could be fit on the shelves. I recycled the stuff that was falling apart/too old, took what I wanted and the rest, I gave out to new teachers or student teachers. My predecessor here was a bit of a pack rat, to put it mildly.

    It’s a good thing I’m not sentimental about books, especially in a library.

    1. megaboo*

      I really enjoy a good weeding session. I feel like librarians hold on to stuff so long because it’s not guaranteed we’ll have money for a replacement!

    2. Blue Spoon*

      The stuff you find during weeding! I work at a public library, and during my very first weeding project, I found a book about 1950’s pop culture that had all of the pictures of Marilyn Monroe cut out of it. The wildest thing was that some member of library staff had known that this had happened to the book and chosen to keep it in the collection–there was even a note in the back indicating as much.

    3. Forrest Rhodes*

      I love finding old textbooks, encyclopedias, etc.! It’s such a treat to read them and recognize how much we’ve learned since their printing.

      One favorite book on my current bookshelf is a geology textbook that was published in 1896 (not a typo: 1896), well before all the exciting geologic findings of the early 1900s. I’m currently at the age where I really need to be getting rid of things so my remaining family doesn’t have to deal with them after I check out, and my days of studying geology are long past, but I still just can’t let go of this book!

    4. canuckian*

      I forgot-in that back room were also FIVE large boxes of dot matrix computer paper, continuous feed type–with the sprocket holes on the side. I gave one box to an EA who did Scouts and myself and a volunteer over a couple years, went through and separated the pages and took off the sides–it’s my scrap paper. That was in 2009 and I’m on the last box of it now. I just checked the label–each box had 2200 sheets of paper and was from Grand & Toy. The box I have is still full. At one point I had to hide the scrap paper box because teachers were using THAT paper in our laser printer and it jammed like nobody’s business (too thin).

      Oh, and three boxes of metal shelf ends (not book ends which slot into the shelf to hold the books up) but the parts that go on each end of the shelf and the slot into the metal legs/stands. I have to assume that when the school opened back in the late 80s, the person furnishing the library didn’t realize that all the shelves come with two shelf ends, so had ordered these in addition to what came with the shelves, because there were no shelves without ends. I kept them for a couple years, I felt bad getting rid of them but finally I asked the custodian to get rid of them.

      1. Paint N Drip*

        My mom’s office found a few reams or boxes of that feed-through paper pre-printed for accounting I guess, columns and rows in green. VERY exciting coloring page fodder for me at the time!

    5. Jigglypuff*

      When I started at a middle school library, I found all of the Holocaust books shoved in a box under my desk. Staff informed me that the previous “librarian” [scare quotes because I was the first degreed librarian they’d ever had] didn’t believe in the Holocaust and therefore hid the books to prevent the kids from accessing them.

      I also had to weed the collection – we had books older than my parents and once I cleaned out all the very old, outdated, inaccurate stuff it was much easier for the students to find the books they wanted to read!

    6. MerelyMe*

      When I got my current dental school job, I was told there were course materials in my filing cabinets. The first drawer I opened happened to be full of full-size plastic skulls. (The course in question is head and neck anatomy.)

    7. Marian the Medical Librarian*

      I was closing a hospital library and found a book on AIDS from 1986 that was still available to check out. I also found multiple bound volumes of a nursing journal dating back to 1911. I took some of those with me just to look at.

    8. MigraineMonth*

      I grew up with a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica and the kind of family where “That’s a great question! Why don’t you look it up in the encyclopedias?” was a common answer to our questions about the world. So I’d have to stop eating dinner, look it up in the index, find the right encyclopedia(s), look it up there and read it aloud to the family.

      At which point my parents would frequently exchange a meaningful glance and say, “Oh, hmm, why don’t you look in the 1991 update?” So I’d have to pull out the encyclopedia update from 1991 to figure out how the fall of the Soviet Union had changed the answer to my question.

      Getting a digital encyclopedia–even just on computer CDs–was life-changing.

  65. The Original K.*

    Condoms and condom wrappers in our married former boss’s office. He and his wife lived over an hour away; we never met her. We assumed he was cheating.

    1. Whychild1*

      Yep, condoms. Lots and lots, with various *ahem* features. I put them in a clear jar and left it on their new desk with a post-it facing outward “Don’t need – free to good homes.” The person was incompetent, unpleasant, entitled and out of the office for a few days.

  66. Esmae*

    A few months after I left an old job, I discovered that the coworker I’d been giving rides to had left seven individually wrapped slices of cheese in my glove compartment.

  67. Laura*

    I’m a scientist and in my new role, I was assigned a spot in the lab to set up as I preferred. There were some boxes underneath my bench that nobody had bothered to look in for years – turned out they were full of old animal samples in jars of formalin, including both individual organs and whole mice. We ended up moving buildings a year after I started and I got stuck with figuring out how to safely dispose of those samples. Thankfully we are no longer doing animal testing!

  68. Ann Onymous*

    A coworker and I were looking for something in the storage cabinets in our lab and found one of those big colorful round parachutes with the handles all around the edge like kids use in elementary school gym class. We work at a large company in an industry that has nothing to do with kids, and for security reasons, people bringing their kids to the office isn’t really a thing. Nobody else who uses the lab has any idea where this parachute came from.

    1. ferrina*

      That’s amazing! I would claim it immediately.

      When I was cleaning out a drawer in my office, we found markers, art supplies, and colorful frisbees. We work in a very corporate office that has no use for any of those. No clue how they got there.

    2. Seeking Second Childhood*

      I’d put money on it being a long-ago manager’s idea for a team-building activity.

    1. Possum's mom*

      …and the previous owner of said desk was a very young woman who definitely didn’t wear dentures. Why she had them there is anybody’s guess.

    2. FedIT*

      Once, a very long time ago, my grandparents were driving down the road. My grandfather was going to sneeze, so he turned his head and sneezed his upper dentures out the window. He immediately pulled over and went to look for them, but couldn’t find them. He came back to the car to find my grandmother lying on the front seat laughing hysterically while a state trooper was doing the same thing across the hood of the car.

      1. Pixel*

        When my late father was 12, he face-planted into the floor of his classroom and broke out his two front teeth. Since they were adult teeth, he got an upper plate. When he was in the Navy during Vietnam, on the boat over he heaved them over the side during some rough seas. Somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific ocean is Dad’s upper plate.

        1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

          One of the songs my Senior Ukulele Group is practicing at the moment for the Christmas concert is a song my Homer & Jethro. “All I want for Christmas is my Upper Plate”

  70. Josame*

    In the 90s, when we still had paper files, a boss found hundreds of phone notes in a drawer when she cleaned out the desk of a coworker who had quit. Stacked up, it was many inches of paper, some from years ago. She gave everyone an inch or so of papers and we tried to go through them, calling clients where there was enough information. Some clients had been handled (because they’d called back) and some were still waiting for a response.
    We all wondered why the coworker had kept these notes and not just thrown them out before he left.

  71. I'm an NP now*

    I inherited an exam room at a primary care office. During one of my first visits in that room, I was looking for gloves in the exam table drawers and found that one of the drawers contained nothing but two oven mitts. It turns out the provider I was replacing used them to cover the footrests when doing GYN exams. Not a bad solution, actually, they’re comfortable and also lighten the mood! I used them a few times (and made sure the patients kept their socks on).

  72. HigherEdEscapee*

    In another lifetime I worked in a company that was making some big changes in departmental placement and who was in what office. This required moving an odd-duck finance person from her long held dark office on a largely empty floor to the next floor up with the rest of finance. She put up quite the fight, but once she was finally moved, with the considerable help of facilities folks, a friend of mine moved into her former office, opened up the blinds, and began to set up.

    I was just across the aisle when I heard a scream.

    My friend had opened a drawer and discovered it almost completely full of nail clippings. These were not small nail clippings and this was not a small drawer.
    Facilities showed up in appropriate gear with a high powered vacuum and removed them all, then disinfected the drawer. My friend never used the drawer for anything and, as the previous occupant of the office was right upstairs, she was called into a meeting with HR.

      1. Mentally Spicy*

        Right? Why is this apparently a THING that people do? I wondered if maybe for some reason they felt weird about putting what is essentially a body part in the bin? But then …. they choose the desk as the next logical place? Yeah, I got nothing.

        1. I Have RBF*

          I don’t get it either. I try to capture my clippings so they go into the trash, not the floor, but can’t fathom saving them. It’s just gross.

        2. JustaTech*

          When I moved into a new room in college I discovered to my horror that the previous occupant had stuck all his boogers to the underside of the desk. Like, many dozens.
          Like, why? We all had trashcans!

          (It didn’t help that I discovered this first thing in the morning because I had moved my mattress under the desk because the building A/C couldn’t keep up with the summer heat so sleeping on the floor was the only sensible option.)

  73. exSQFFFer*

    I found an entire, miniaturized diorama of the office, complete with desks, tables, smoking area outside, and hung up motivational posters. The cherry on top was that each person working there had there own figurine, complete with distinctive accessories.

    When I found it, the former employee was posed as having his feet up on his desk, smoking a cigarette and eating a miniature Subway sandwich. He had left the position to open a Subway franchise.

      3. exSQFFFer*

        Almost everything was done by hand as well. Some of the figurines were repurposed/re-painted from some off-brand toy set, but most were hand done as well.

        I think I still have it stashed in a drawer somewhere.

        If it wasn’t clear, I was a direct replacement for this person without ever having me them. When I showed it to the other people in the office, they were like “Oh yeah, that’s totally something Former Employee would do”.

  74. AG*

    $20,000, plus a few thousand more in loose coins. Turns out that when the bookkeeper quit, the ex-CFO never bothered to deposit the cash (it was the bookkeeper’s job), and the receptionist just shoved it all in a closet.

    2. H.Regalis*

      I was helping a hoarder friend try to clean, and we found hundreds of dollars in a stack of old birthday cards. Blew my mind.

      1. pandop*

        We found lots of pennies/tuppences in Brylcreme tubs after my Grandad died, but it added up to the tens of pounds, not tens of thousands!

  75. JMac*

    The person I took over for wrote herself an email everyday with a list of everything she did that day. Each list had 10-12 things on it. She then sent the email to herself, printed it, 3-hole punched it and put it in a binder. She did this every single day she worked for 33 years. Then she retired and left them all over her cluttered office that I inherited. I had to recycle so much paper from her office it was unreal. People still come in my office now, 2 years later and comment on how much bigger it seems.

    2. Frieda*

      I moved offices (voluntarily) and went from a space I’d been in for 16 years to a slightly larger space down the hall.

      The recycling almost filled one of the huge commercial bins (the kind on wheels but like 2x the ones you might get for your home.) Plus I donated stuff, plus tossed stuff, plus took some recycling home. Taught me a lesson, it did!

  77. New Desk, Who Dis?*

    I just did a clean out of an office I moved into, in this, the year of our lord 2024. No one had cleared the stuff from anyone preceding them. There was an ungodly amount of old paperwork dating back as far as February of 1980.

    Some of the weirder things I found included a red Coke frisbee, a dining chair cushion, a late 90s/early 2000s era “tablet” (complete with software disk), and a birthday list (from the 90s) of “People Who Want to Celebrate”. Only a single person on that list still worked here!

    3. Dancing Otter*

      I just emptied the last file folder from my mother’s former storage. When we cleared her house I was in too much shock at some of what we found, and apparently missed disposing of her old tax records.
      Joint returns with my father, who died in 1974. Returns from the 1950s, possibly the late 1940s. (Did you know you used to be able to deduct interest paid on credit cards? )
      The file box was stored in a corner of her 2nd husband’s workshop, behind the kit to build a canoe, which he had moved from Pittsburgh in 1974 and never started.
      I think that beats your 1980 paperwork.

  78. juliebulie*

    This was five-ten years ago. We needed to clean out a couple of filing cabinets that had been filled by two people who had left the company more than ten years earlier. I tried to quickly go through the files to determine if there was anything worth keeping. It turned out that most of it was totally useless; they had printed and filed things that were available electronically, including a LOT of emails… like imagine you kept the last email of a chain, which has all of the messages in it; but you also kept all the individual emails from within the chain, each of which has the whole history of the chain so far. I was throwing away almost everything, including floppy disks, outdated catalogs, standards from before I was born, calendars, the works.

    But one thing caught my eye: an email in which one of the participants expressed a wish, most likely facetious, to shoot an SME who was not part of the email chain. The actual quote: “If only that [costume prop] had been a real gun.” Yikes.

  79. Sprinkles N Jimmies*

    The exoskeleton of a horseshoe crab! And no, I didn’t work at a zoo or aquarium or somewhere where that would be (somewhat) normal.

  80. ACA*

    About twelve Canadian-formatted DVDs of the same movie – I think it was “Two Weeks Notice” with Sandra Bullock.

    A friend at that same job said she found her predecessor’s passport and driver’s license in the back of drawer (thankfully both were expired).

    1. juliebulie*

      Interesting movie choice – as if they had planned to hand out copies of the movie when they gave their two weeks’ notice?

    2. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

      I wonder if someone got a deal and brought them to handout with layoff notices and someone else convinced them it was a bad idea.

  81. Maple Moose*

    When my coworker retired we found a whole drawer full of weapons that he had (likely, presumably) confiscated from folks attending our office/programs. The worst weapon was a 9 inch hunting knife … at least it was in a protective case/sheath?!?!?!

    We work in the social services field so we have seen some strange things, this is not even in my top 5 strangest things to have seen at work lol.

  82. Nanc*

    35 years ago I bought a giant metal used desk for my home office. The middle pencil drawer kept sticking so I pulled it all the way out and discovered blueprints for a tank, stamped confidential. Apparently the desk was one of many sold to the local used furniture warehouse when one of the local defense companies upgraded all their office desks. I had a friend who worked there and she said to just throw the plans away. Fun fact: at that plant they had real, working prototype tanks and any employee who wanted to could drive one around the test track on their birthday!

  83. David's Skirt-pants*

    Found in ceilings during various renovations:
    –80s-era can of Pepsi-cola
    –full-size garage door, rolled up and built over

    Found in boss’s office upon retirement:
    –my business card from 3 jobs ago

    Found in various former employees’ desks:
    –6 iPads and 5 iPhones, brand new in box
    –clip-in hair extension
    –printed memorandums and contracts dated 1998-2001
    –multiple pieces of evidence of fraud

  84. HonorBox*

    While not exactly at work, I was volunteering to help clean out an old church that had been a youth center and was being converted into some sort of educational space. The coordinator told us that if there was anything of interest, we could keep it. There wasn’t much that could be salvaged or used, but I took home boxes and boxes and boxes of unopened packs of Yo! MTV Rap cards.

      1. Not Australian*

        It appears some of them have trade-in value.

        Personally, though, I would grab hold of just about any clean cardstock, no matter what was printed on it, because it would come in handy for crafts. I had a lovely time working through a couple of thousand surplus ads for a club (which opened and closed in very short order) and some suspension files my friend found in their attic…

  86. Anne of Green Gables*

    When I started in my current position, there had been very little turnover in the previous 10-20 years. I came in at the beginning of a wave of retirements. There were two people who retired within 6 months of my start who had each been there 20+ years. Apparently they both thought they, and only they, should be in charge of the batteries. (I’m talking standard AA and AAA batteries.) Both had huge hoards of batteries. Some were at least a decade old. When we found their hoards after they retired, we had to throw out almost all of them, as several were warped and clearly no good anymore.

    1. Bossy*

      What is up with people and battery storage?! My now husband had a stash when I first met him which had been around for awhile and were, to his surprise, unusable, by the time they were needed. Glad I’ve been able to dissuade him in years since. And remember the rechargeable batteries? Don’t get me started on that bs…

  87. werewolf*

    The electric prongs from a plug stuck in the wall outlet. I guess someone yanked something out by the cord and left the prongs behind. This is a cubicle, so one of those outlets that’s at desk height, not down out of sight, out of mind. And what’s weird is the previous owner of the desk still worked there, and she didn’t remember them, so maybe they got stuck there in the COVID time between our occupancies.

    I probably should have taken care of them sooner, butI just ignored them for the most part. Until one day, early in the morning before coffee, I happened to glance at them and think to myself, “They’re such an eyesore, I ought to throw them out,” and grabbed one without thinking. I zapped myself of course… No lasting damage, but I alerted maintenance and they removed them that day. Which is good, because it was kind of fun, actually.

  88. Ann O'Nemity*

    We found a signature stamp. We couldn’t read it at first but then someone realized it was the signature of George W. Bush! We were never able to come up with a reasonable explanation of why anyone at our company would need the President’s signature on a stamp. Like, why?? It still baffles me.

  89. hereforthecomments*

    I love these! I clean out offices all the time (I’m good at it and enjoy it so I do it even if not directly asked). I’ve found money, a complete set of real china, stamps (yes, I kept and used them), artwork (I got to keep some very nice prints that were professionally framed; I have them in my home), fans, eyeglasses, confidential files with SS numbers (I took care of those according to procedure–that really bothered me). Plus a lot books, office supplies (reused in my department), mugs, CDs and DVDs (kept the rewritable kind). One person bought pretty colored paperclips and I took those and am still using them. My current pen holder, pop up post it holder, office mirror, wood paper tray and office umbrella were all abandoned. I’ve given things to coworkers, the local thrift store and friends. I don’t like waste!

  90. Meg*

    Oh man, I finally have one! When I started grad school, the university assigned offices to every grad student, and I was excited to get mine. Yay! A space of my own!

    Well, folks in academia rarely clean out their desks after they leave, weather it be students of faculty (at least in my experience). In exploring my new office I opened the first drawer on the desk next to me, only to find a ceramic plate with a pile of ketchup on it. It was quite old.

    Then, in my first job in academia after graduating, I was given an office of someone who had previously been in the position for decades, and seemingly after he left he took *nothing* with him. He was also a hoarder. I tossed about a hundred old ordering catalogues, VHS tapes, and so much more. One thing that I was told not to touch was the old paperwork– there might be something useful in there! There was about three large filing cabinets worth of it. I let the paperwork sit for two years (no one ever opened the cabinets), and then one summer I started to go through it all. Guess what? It was mostly garbage! Some of it literally (a forgotten grocery bag of old candy comes to mind– there were bugs). Copies of old receipts dating back to the 70s, sign up sheets for potlucks, you name it! The man did not want to make the switch over to digital.

    The potluck thing was even worse, because he had students sign up with their student ID number, which back in the day was their social security number! All in all I kept about 7 or so files, and even those could *probably* be tossed.

    Now anytime someone leaves the department, I make sure the office is cleaned and ready for the new occupant because NO ONE deserves to encounter a room full of garbage.

    1. Middle Aged Lady*

      When I was an office manager at a library my boss asked me to clean out the office of a beloved, but disorganized librarian when he left. At the bottom of the very last drawer I cleaned out, I found a book on how to get organized.

      Library staffroom closet: we found papers with 20-year old suggestions for how to improve the staff lounge, including some complaints about what was offered in the vending machines. Some from a guy who still worked there, and was still complaining.

      Clean-out of a library cataloging/binding/serials area where we found some gems: an old ‘binder comb’ used to measure journal issues to see how many could be hard-bound in one book, and a complicated wheel-thingy used to calculate and project how many issues of a journal you would get in a year. (All done by computer systems now.) i know these are arcane and I am not describing them well, but I thought a few readers would enjoy rhem.

  91. Actuary Mom*

    When I started my first actuarial job, I sat at the desk of the guy I replaced. I gave a wide berth to a folder in the file drawer labeled “XXX”—didn’t look in it, didn’t touch it, pretended it didn’t exist. Then I learned that a recently adopted Actuarial Guideline had been called XXX as a placeholder until it was adopted and got properly numbered. The folder just contained the draft of the guideline.

  92. I Count the Llamas*

    Fortunately not myself, but another manager had to clean out the desk of an employee she fired. She found two pairs of very obviously used and dirty underwear. Her screech when she realized what she was touching was heard round the floor.

  94. JayEss*

    Found in 2022: a cold case police file ca 1978 from a small town in Washington, filed alongside children’s program handouts from the early 2000s in a filing cabinet in my Canadian library.

    I checked, it was really a police file, not a mimic for a mystery program.

  95. PM17*

    We cleaned out our graphics suite in 2018 (in an U.S. government building) and found old dot matrix print outs. Strange enough as dot matrix printers were used in the 70s/80s and we didn’t have one anymore, but the print outs were all of women in the nude. It was obvious by the way the women were, ahem, portrayed that this was actually done quite a while ago and not a recent photo someone converted to a dot matrix format. Let’s just say porn looked different a few decades ago.

  96. Katie N.*

    When we came back from COVID we were hotdesking for a month or so and I found a Post-It note with someone’s pros and cons list about whether to get divorced. I’ve always wondered what they decided.

  97. colin broccoli*

    I was working as an art handler on a medical museum move. We found a lot of things.
    There was a box labelled “contents of Dr. X’s desk” and in it we found:
    a Planter’s Peanut jar full of human teeth
    a box labelled “radioactive isotope from X experiment” (shut down the site for the day until we got a geiger counter)

  98. librarian*

    Small college library a long time ago. Old cloth diaper which had served great purpose as a hanky, and a stash of nail clippings. Yum.

  99. Boom*

    Explosives. This was during the decommissioning of a facility that manufactured items that included a large quantity of explosives. When it was in operation, the facility was strictly divided in two halves – active (where anything explosive was handled) and inert (no explosives ever). During decommissioning, we took all the necessary precautions on the active side, buildings were being cleared by trained explosives experts, we wore nomex clothing, etc. But the inert side was much more relaxed. Of course, until that day when someone found live explosives samples in a desk in an administrative building!

  100. The Rural Juror*

    A box set of cassette tapes for a course on business development and management. This was in about 2016 and the tapes were probably from the early 90s. I didn’t have a cassette player to listen to them!

  101. Not Your Mother*

    At my Big Multinational Defense Company job, I was cleaning out a long-abandoned storage closet and came across some taped-up boxes, sealed and signed by the admin two admins ago, who left in 2002. Inside these boxes were, among other things, VHS tape recordings of customer presentations given in 1983. I don’t think we’ve had a VHS player on site since the 90s, so why these tapes were sitting in a box in the closet labeled “GOOD STUFF — NEED TO SORT” is a mystery I’ll never understand.

  102. Your pit of rage*

    I got my first job teaching social studies in 1999. I took over for a teaching taking a medical retirement mid year who literally left his keys on his desk and left.

    I cleaned out one drawer and found ditto-copies (remember the old lavender-ink ones) of CURRENT EVENT articles about WATERGATE. In 1999.

    There was also a slide projector that a dinosaur in the department refused to throw in the dumpster despite us having the most up to date DVD technology. High school storage closets are mausoleums.

    1. Rara Avis*

      No kidding! My husband was teaching art at a school built in the 60’s. He had to move classrooms, which involved first cleaning the science closet he was moving to. (The room hadn’t been used for a few years and the science department had no interest in helping/taking any of the supplies, textbooks. etc. Or dealing with the random unlabeled chemicals.) Then he had to sort and move 60 years worth of squirrelled away art and craft supplies. We found ink bottles from the 60’s, among other treasures.

    2. Mad Harry Crewe*

      I *loved* when our class handouts were ditto copied rather than photocopied. Colorful ink is so much more fun.

  103. Pay no attention...*

    My old boss was a bit of a paper hoarder — he kept everything in files, which eventually moved to the basement in bankers boxes when he ran out of room in his office cabinets. When he suddenly retired during the pandemic 2021, I was the one who had to clean out his office. I found in his desk drawer files a receipt for an office party cake from 1997. Once the bill has been paid and the cake eaten, I can’t even imagine why anyone would need the receipt to prove there was a cake.

    Fun additional note: we had moved offices three times since 2007 when I started at the org. This wasn’t just a matter of sticking it in a box and forgetting that it was there… he had packed up these files and moved them office to office.

    1. Pay no attention...*

      Almost forgot… he also had 12 wooden foot-long rulers scattered about his drawers — the kind you find in an elementary school. I can’t imagine why he had one, let alone a dozen. Again, all of those had been packed and moved at least 3 times and he never once thought to just toss them.

  104. Bible Break*

    I moved into a office and was going through shelves and drawers of what had been left behind and found a KJV Bible with a post-it on it that said “Do NOT remove! This is [Jane Doe’s] Bible!” We were not a religious entity in any way (and were in fact government employees), so this was a little curious. I inquired as to who Jane Doe was, and it turns out it was the evening custodian who enjoyed taking a Bible break in my new office every evening. I felt guilty, but I did ask if the Bible could be returned to her and if she could take the break elsewhere, as the idea of her chilling in my office every evening seemed a little strange.

  105. Peanut Hamper*

    I’ve mentioned this before, but when I cleaned out a colleague’s cubicle, I found a printing cheat sheet tacked to the wall of her cubicle that described how to print documents from all the software programs we used. It was basically a list that looked like this:

    Microsoft WORD: FILE menu, then “Print”
    Microsoft EXCEL: FILE menu, then “Print”
    Adobe ACROBAT: FILE menu, then “Print”

    etc., etc., etc.

    Of course, she had typed this up in Word, and then printed it.

    She printed everything. And I mean everything. She printed ALL THE THINGS!

    1. Strive to Excel*

      For anyone from yesterday’s thread who was confused about how people do not transfer skills from one program to another – this is a prime example of someone who has learned the pathways but not the underlying concept.

      1. Silver Robin*

        Exactly what I was going to say! I have had to walk adults through the lateral applications of knowledge. “You know how to print in Word, right? Okay, so it is the same process here, do you see it?” It takes some effort not to make that sound condescending, which is part of why I try to have really warm relationships with coworkers, so they know I am trying to be helpful. Even if part of me absolutely is biting my tongue.

  106. Snarky Monkey*

    When I was cleaning out the desk of an engineer that I’d fired, I found nearly 100 yellow legal pads with notes that he’d taken – but ONLY on the first page. Every other sheet was completely blank. Under his desk was a stash of nearly 50 more unused pads, just waiting for their call to duty.

    Needless to say, we didn’t need to buy new legal pads for years!

    1. Mad Harry Crewe*

      You might think you can write on the lower pages of a legal pad, but think again! Those are just there for padding – that’s how you know you’re getting the real Legal Pad Writing Experience (TM).

    2. Pay no attention...*

      OMG, that’s maybe going to be me… except that I have a system. I use a different notepad for each major work project so all notes and lists are contained on one notepad and not mixed in with other projects and notes. And then when it’s complete, I tear off the used sheets and toss them. I can have 4-5 major projects at a time so it looks like I’m just using the top 1-2 pages of random notepads.

  107. RightSaidFed*

    Right after 9/11, I took over the duties of our paralegal at a trade association, as he had enlisted in the National Guard. I was tasked with going through the files on his computer. There were multiple copies of a document explaining how to perform cunnilingus (!), multiple copies of his resume and job applications, and several non-work related documents he’d clearly been working on during work hours. I was so glad I was going to law school before he came back.

  108. FuzzFrogs*

    I work in a public library. Things I’ve found just in our staff areas:

    –The nametag of the original manager of the branch. He been dead about 10 years at that point, I think? (Apparently he himself was a pack rat; I later found his metal ruler, which I happily kept, and one manager found a folder he’d kept of all the unsolicited faxes we had ever received.)
    –An old photo album of pictures from programs, including pictures from ’92 of a *mountain lion* chilling on a table, being pet by small children. One of our employees actually remembered the program; the mountain lion was heavily tranquilized and, apparently, brought in from a sanctuary in the back seat of a Jeep.
    –We have a second “floor” that’s really just access to the HVAC system. You get to it by using incredibly steep stairs in the back of a dim utility closet. At some point, the library got two full-size standees of the girls from Vampire Academy. Someone put them at the top of the stairs. Scared the crap out of me when I found them.
    –Lots, and lots, of unused floppy disks. I actually have used a set of rainbow floppies during Babytime, as sensory tools. I love seeing the parents’ faces when I bring them out.

  109. Chocoholic*

    After a person who was doing accounts payable left, we found a bunch of unpaid invoices in her desk drawer. EEK!

  110. Ailsa R.*

    I worked for as an researcher at a university where there was lots of turnover amongst early career folk. After the pandemic when we were returned we were all assigned new offices. when I drawers I’d been assigned it was like excavating an archaeological site. There were printed journal articles and payslips dating back 10 years. Underneath those (so presumably more than 10 years old…) were a pair of WORN and STAINED boxers and a soccer strip smelling of ancient BO from someone who had been on the department’s soccer team a very long time ago. After making enquiries it was found the owner of the articles had left in 2010, presumably after a sweaty soccer match, and never returned.

  111. cactus lady*

    I just cleaned out my desk and found that my predecessor printed out EVERY email she sent, then highlighted them, made comments and annotations in red pen. These were emails she had sent, not emails she received. My favorite one was one she had sent to the CEO telling her she was an idiot… not long before she was fired.

  112. Seal*

    All of these are from a former workplace where I moved offices at least 3 times:

    Half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s
    A box of shotgun shells, apparently received in a box of donated items,
    A pile of love letters sent to the former occupant by their stalker,
    Hand-drawn porn that was beautifully rendered (but wildly inappropriate)
    A deck drawer filled to the brim with starlight mints (not sure if the former occupant ever had any because no one ever heard any unwrapping sounds).

    The secret lives of librarians!

  113. Liz*

    My office’s practice is to hire people as receptionists and then promote them after a year or so. This meant I inherited a reception desk with drawers full of old forgotten files. I finally made time to go through them and found inspection reports, employee handbooks, and other paper files dating back to 2008. This was in 2021. There were also a bunch of old stamps from decades past, which I claimed as my due.

    In the same position I did a major clean of the copy room and discovered a bunch of boxes of matches, which apparently dated back to when smoking was allowed in the office. Again: 2021.

    1. Guacamole Bob*

      I did major copy room cleanouts at two different jobs. I don’t remember particularly noteworthy items (these cleanouts were in 2001ish and 2009ish), but it’s astonishing the way junk accumulates. Often no one feels like they have permission to trash stuff and so it sits around until someone takes it on as a project. Outdated letterhead, brittle or gummy rubber bands, useless stacks of specialty envelopes from a mailing many years prior, cheapo logo pens from some event that are all dried out, random parts of report covers and file tab sets, it’s too easy to let that stuff just sit there even if it’s in the way and means you can’t find the stuff you do use.

      Also, every single supply cabinet and copy room I’ve worked around has way too many binder clips, butterfly paper clips, brass fasteners, etc. Apparently keeping paper together was a more common need in the past than it is for most people today.

      1. Nightengale*

        I was using specialty color paperclips to organize papers as recently as 2019. My current medical practice is not paperless but it does use less paper than that prior one.

      2. pandop*

        We use speciality brass paperclips on items in the Special Collections of the library – if we have to attach something

  114. LadyAmalthea*

    I started as WFH in 2021, and when we started to return to office, after nearly 2 years of for the most part WFH, the sheer volume of expired soup packets, beer from parties past that we were afraid to open (most of which, amusingly, was Corona), and packets of condiments was truly remarkable.

    I was glad to have been able to reunite a pair of shoes with the person who used to sit at my desk, but who had changed units.

    Still lurking in that office is a giant pile of stationary that, based on the Department name on the heading, is between 24 and 29 years old, that I am slowly bringing home for my toddlers to scribble on because we all feel bad about just tossing it in the recycling bin.

    1. ferrina*

      Excellent use for old stationary. I made a donation of branded pencils to my kid’s classroom after my workplace updated their logo and we weren’t supposed to use the stationary with the old logo.

    2. Rara Avis*

      All my childhood artwork is on the back of dot matrix printouts from my grandfather’s business. This was the 70’s and 80’s, so it was a good reuse/recycle program.

    3. Chocoholic*

      My husband used to work somewhere that the printer would randomly spew out paper with gibberish printed on one side. He would bring that home for our kids to draw on. We still have some, and it is known as the “gibberish paper.” It is a good use for paper that is basically unusable at work and kids who want to draw on everything.

    4. Snow Angels in the Zen Garden*

      This made me smile. My childhood artwork was on lunch menus from a high school. I still treat paper that is entirely blank on both sides as more precious than it is.

  115. Goose*

    I worked at a nonprofit where I was in charge of launching a brand new initiative. When cleaning out the office, I found meeting notes about why we needed this initiative–dated 20 years previous. I kept the notes pinned to my board all the years I worked there!

    1. JustaTech*

      One time my boss was cleaning out an old file cabinet and started laughing uproariously – he’d just found a printed sheet of “Projects to work on” from 8 years before that were the same dang projects that we were working on then, but management acted like were Brand New Ideas.

      He kept the list and every time a project was killed and then resurrected he put a little tick mark next to it. Some things had come back 4 times.

  116. Keep your clippings to yourself*

    A few years ago, my company did a big cube shuffle and my team got moved to a different floor, to an area previously occupied by one of the longest-standing teams in the company. I think they had been in the same cubes for ages. Not me, but one of my coworker came down to his “new” cube only to discover mountains of nail clippings under his assigned desk. Picture little white sand dunes of half-moon clippings and a dusty layer of human detritus–a true biohazardous wasteland of discarded human cells. We had to borrow a vacuum from the admin to take care of it, but even then, the carpet under his desk was also generally filthy and worn down to the concrete in a couple of places. Mind you, all of the other cubes around this one were reasonably clean and the carpet itself wasn’t even that old.
    Thankfully, this cube move happened in March of 2020 — two days before we all went for a “test work-from-home day” and never returned to the office. So my coworker never had to actually work from the biohazard desk. I looked up who had been sitting there before and had a screenshot of his contact card saved on my work computer for while under the file name “terrible person.png”.

    1. AD Collins*

      I can’t believe the number of people who’ve found nail clippings in their “new” desks! Gross!

  117. Bitsy*

    I’ve told this story here before, but I’ll tell it again.

    I was working at the library reference desk in a new job when I opened a drawer to find it full of broken staplers. I asked my boss why we had them. She said so they could be repaired someday.

    By who, I thought, The Traveling Stapler Repairman?

    Over the next few months I threw them away, one at a time. Nobody ever noticed.

    This became a metaphor, for the nuttiness you inevitably find in a new job. It might take awhile to turn up, it might turn up quickly. It might be a big deal, or it might be small enough to be charming. But always, always, if you wait long enough, you’re going to find The Drawer of Broken Staplers.

    1. Blue Spoon*

      Oh man, there must be something about libraries and staplers, because my library has a veritable dragons’ hoard of heavy-duty staples that don’t fit any of our regularly used staplers.

      1. WLP*

        I own a red Swingline. It comes with me to every office job to remind me of the ridiculousness that is work sometimes-to-often.

  118. Snarkus Aurelius*

    It’s not so much what I found in my desk drawer, but what I took when I left.

    I had a job where multiple offices had a communal kitchen. My boss, coworkers, and I could never find salt/pepper packets, condiment packets, plastic cutlery, etc. there so I took it upon myself to collect those things en mass and store them in my desk drawer. Because I was such a doormat, I told my boss and coworkers to come to my office if they needed condiments because I was collecting them over time. They did! (They never bothered to store their own collection though.)

    I left that job on horrible terms. My boss was a doormat, and my coworker was bullying, harassing, and sabotaging me.

    When I left, I took every damn salt/pepper packet, condiment packet, and plastic cutlery with me. (Think of every that condiment ever existed. I had it!) To really make my point, I dumped everything (but the cutlery) into the trash can in front of the office building. There must have been at least 200 packets.

    I’m still happy I did that. Zero regrets.

  119. Nonny-nonny-non*

    We had people in replacing the sprinkler valves in the suspended ceiling at work. In one office they lifted a ceiling tile and out fell a large black umm…. marital aid.
    It narrowly missed the head of one worker; our Health and Safely officer was heard saying something like “Thank god it didn’t hit them, I do *not* want to write that accident report.”

  120. Liv*

    When cleaning out an old coworker’s desk, we found what can only be described as a burn book. It detailed her grievances with everyone in the office–mostly written in 2nd person POV.

    She didn’t write anything all that revelatory, although she did say my house was ugly :(

  121. Massive Dynamic*

    My boss and I found a HUGE stack of printed files that old coworker was supposed to have been working on, untouched. She’d been telling Boss that she was working through them but instead she hid them all, not even in her desk, but in a random old filing cabinet in the break room.

  123. Red*

    At my last job I found from the person I replaced:
    -A small pile of fingernails (the previous employee apparently enjoyed nail care at their desk)
    -All sorts of printed religious chain emails (the ‘pass this on to ten friends to receive christ’s blessing’ kind)
    -I guess the previous employee was besties with the previous owner because there were also printed emails from the owner to the employee detailing the owner’s cruise ship vacations
    -The most heinous thing though for me was finding that she filed everything by due date rather than alphabetically. It took days to reorganize the filing.

  124. TooTiredToThink*

    Not super exciting now, but I was cleaning out my desk and found a FBI Confidential stamp (the kind you use to stamp documents). At the time I was confused because we definitely did not work for the FBI and I was the first person to use this cubicle/desk in our brand new building. Turns out our company had bought these cubicles used. So apparently the FBI used to own them and someone forgot to fully clear out their desk! I threw the stamp away like a hot potato (oh no, this doesn’t feel legal!) but now I wish I’d kept it for the laugh value.

    1. Paint N Drip*

      Grocery list? CONFIDENTIAL
      Vet bill? CONFIDENTIAL
      New fridge manual? uh yeah that’s CONFIDENTIAL pal

  125. JustaTech*

    When we moved into a new building (recently-ish vacated by another company in our industry) my office mate and I found a list of planned projects from the other company.
    Nothing super shocking or confidential or damning, but still a weird thing to just leave lying around in a drawer.

    When I cleaned out my old boss’ office after he was laid off (and didn’t have time to clean out properly) I found a stack of his business cards from all his prior companies. It felt very bittersweet; mementos of grand plans that didn’t work out. (I gave them back along with a whole box of other personal stuff.)

  127. soontoberetired*

    A director was fired suddenly, and in the clean up his office the found a trash can full of empty bite size candy. He had only been in the office for a week. A manager had been wondering where all his candy was going.

  128. Emikyu*

    At my last job, I inherited a desk that had belonged to someone who left a few months before I came on board. No one had bothered to clean it out.

    The last person who used the desk had not bothered to take her lunch home. I found an insulated lunch bag (obviously no longer cold by this point) with yogurt inside. What mystifies me is that apparently no one had been bothered by the smell until I came along. Trust me, it was as bad as you expect.

  129. Blue Spoon*

    I was cleaning out a drawer that I had inherited from the previous holder of my position, who had gone on maternity leave and chosen not to return. There was a completely untouched baby book in there, along with some other miscellaneous “you’re about to have a baby” papers/printouts. Unfortunately, the person had moved and I wasn’t able to get in touch with her, but I hope she had a spare baby book.

  130. JemZ*

    Small government agency, where we had big old wooden desks. Someone retired after over 20 years at the agency, and when my boss went to clear out the desk, they found that all the drawers were filled with used highlighters, mostly yellow, but some blue. The employee used highlighters when he read documents, and apparently kept them all.

  131. WorkIsADumpsterFire*

    Our company moved floors while someone was on maternity leave, so we were tasked with moving her desk while she was out. She had two drawers full of empty Starbucks glass bottles. We just rolled with it and moved them for her.

    1. Silver Robin*

      This is incredible. Was she actually saving them for a reason? Or did she never throw out her trash and you just (inadvertently) did the perfect passive aggressive move of keeping her trash in her desk for her to deal with?

      1. WorkIsADumpsterFire*

        I secretly hope we did the passive aggressive move but we’ll never know. She never said a word!

      2. Strive to Excel*

        I know we unironically save those! The lids have a good seal so they’re good for travel/car-camping when you want to bring liquids along.

  132. Reluctant Cleaner*

    I had the awful task of cleaning out the desk of someone who had retired from here 15 years but was also a hoarder. Their desk had some notable things to include: a stack of old used bus passes, a section of a drawer devoted to nail clippings, and another section of the drawer was FULL of bread ties.

    But on a good note, when I inherited my desk the person who retired left about 6 Starbucks coffee mugs which delighted me because they are good sized and collector’s items.

  133. EttaPlace*

    I just started teaching at a new school. I removed six contractor’s bags worth of junk from my new desk and cabinets behind the desk. Fun items found: Ouija board, deflated kickball, 5 gallon jug full of water, scarf with coins on it that is meant for belly dancing, and over 50 blank mini DV tapes. No camera that takes mini-DVs, but still.

    The desk was like an archaeological dig. The top layer was candy, broken equipment, wires, and a bunch of trash from Harry, my predecessor. Below Harry’s layer was the Lyra layer. That one was full of printed emails, printed rules for contests, old permission forms from 2016 and before, and scads of office supplies and old binders. So. Many. Binders. Everything printed was either completely out of date or available online. Below that, I got to the fabled Justine layer–she had lanyards and badges from film festivals, the Ouija board, a few sweet notes from students, an ancient Tootsie Roll, and a certificate for a win Justine personally had at a festival related to our teaching discipline. I knew all three of the previous teachers at least in passing, so it was really fascinating to see what each of them kept.

    However, I think my replacement at my old school could potentially win this one. For several years, my students had been eating lunch in my classroom and then hiding their lunch trays in various places around the room. When a couple of them came back to visit, they told me they had been hiding them. I found over 100, but I know there are more. There’s also a gorilla costume in the ceiling of that classroom….

  134. EM*

    Trigger warning: sad/ references abortion:

    I was a teacher in a public school that was almost 100 years old, and a friend had a big closet in her science classroom that hadn’t been cleaned out in decades. She decided to do a big cleanup project with some students over the weekend, and they found a jar with an embalmed fetus where some of the embalming fluid had at one point been poured out, so it was only about 3/4 full of fluid. After some digging, it turned out that in the 1970s one of the science teachers had a friend who worked in reproductive health, and this fetus had been provided for educational purposes from someone who’d had an abortion at their clinic (apparently with consent, but this was 40 years later so it was hard to be sure). Because there had been an issue with the embalming fluid the fetus was not in proper shape, and today we have different sensibilities regarding use of human remains than perhaps was true when the specimen was donated. With no great options, the teacher and the students buried it in our school garden, with a small memorial plaque. Still not sure it was the right call, but we were young and the school was incredibly underfunded and had minimal oversight or resources from anyone, and it felt like the best thing to do.

    2. Rara Avis*

      My father, who taught college-level biology, kept the placenta from my brother’s birth in a glass jar in his office. (Ah, the 70’s … can you imagine a hospital just handing over a placenta to an interested parent?) I don’t know what happened to it when he retired, but presumably the university has a biohazard disposal protocol.

      1. linger*

        Many Polynesian cultures have traditions about proper treatment of the placenta (usually involving burying it on tribal ground), so handing it over to a parent is (still) fairly usual.
        Keeping it on display in a glass jar in a workplace, however, is not one of those traditions.

    3. Clisby*

      I remember the biology teacher in my high school had a couple of preserved human fetuses in the lab. I didn’t even think it was strange at the time (this would have been probably 1969 or 1970.)

      1. EM*

        That’s right around the time this was apparently donated, so absolutely tracks! That teacher had retired in the early 70s and she’d had it for awhile before she retired from what we learned, so probably it arrived at then school late 1960s

  135. Not a Playmate*

    Many ages ago when I was in high school, I had a weekend job at a mom-and-pop icecream shop. The original owner had passed away a few years before, and one of my tasks when business was slow was to sort through and clean the multitude of things left behind. In between boxes, I found a 1964 edition of Playboy magazine. The center fold was a drawing of a pin up girl in lingerie. I still have it!

  136. The Rafters*

    Bowling pins. They’d been in that office for so long buried under mounds of papers that they’d become one with the floor. Same office, needed to clean out cabinets for a move. Those particular cabinets were never locked. Boss said it probably contained (the former office alcoholic’s) stash. That is exactly what we found.

  137. Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom*

    Old candy from a decade ago. Checks that were barely at the time of cancellation- this was serious as they were funds for the programs that the school offered.. I had to clean out an office that was neglected for almost five years, and no one seemed to care. I work in higher education so you can probably imagine what I encountered. A used tooth brush. A tub of old clay.

  138. 888 Pocomo*

    We found a collection of clipped finger nails. Why not just throw them in the trash??? And why at work??

  139. HigherEdEscapee*

    At my last job in academia, we were moving out of one office and into a new one. This required a lot of folks paring down what had been in their offices and cubicles for what had been, in some cases, decades. I was one of the people responsible for handling the book cases, storage closets, and the kitchen.
    In the top of the storage closet I found a large binder packed with antique and vintage postcards. It was an entire collection that someone had clearly put together over a long period of time. I asked if it belonged to anyone and got no takers. I brought it home and have been selling off the cards I didn’t frame up for myself.

  140. MassMatt*

    For the first entry (mummified finger in a cigarette box) I HAVE to know–was the prior desk occupant SMOKING the finger?

    Great Halloween entry, either way.

    1. Strive to Excel*

      If I cleaned out a desk and found PART OF A FINGER in there, you’d better believe that my screams would be audible to the neighbors.

  141. AnonAnon*

    FRUIT!! A drawer full of rotting, liquified, fruit.

    Typically though when someone left, someone else at that site would box up their desk and ship it to someone else in the company who worked with the employee (we were all at different locations). I have seen weird, antique medications and official documents that should have been stored in an archive (we are regulated by the government).

  142. big presenter*

    Not someone leaving but over a year of WFH meant the office got weird. When the pandemic was waning, my company decided to open the office again. We are a primarily WFH company who works with stakeholders across a wide geographic range.

    Well, before the pandemic the company was small enough so everyone had their own desks, but upon the reopening we shifted to hotdesking. People found all kinds of things left by people in 2020. But the standout was an incredibly dusty pair of shoes that remained there for nearly a year.

    The person’s whose desk (and shoes) it was still worker there at the time: she took them with her when she left at least.

  143. Anne*

    A file folder with a series of nude photos of the employee and the employee’s wife. Some separate, some as a couple.

  144. Hotdog not dog*

    Back in my EA days it was part of my job to clear out offices and prepare them for the next executive who would occupy them. Lots of odd finds, including porn (so much porn!), used prophylactics, unused prophylactics, overly expired food, nail clippings, unnecessarily printed out emails, what I sincerely hope were head hair clippings, cocaine, booze, and both men’s and women’s underwear.
    In my most recent office job, I opened a drawer in my new desk to find my predecessor’s collection of dried out yellow highlighters. It was the deep drawer meant to hold files and it was entirely full. All obviously dried, since none had caps. (I never found a corresponding stash of caps.)

  145. Justin*

    This is actually my own desk, but before lockdown I had taken to eating a lot of oatmeal for lunch to save money, and by the time I went back to my office a year and a half later, I had a bit more money (same job, but I’d done some adjuncting and speaking engagements) and I totally forgot that there was just a bunch of oatmeal and sugar in and around my desk.

  146. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    Shoved behind an old CRT in an office – a very wizened turnip with a bow tie on.

    No idea.

  147. office cleanout*

    Not a desk so much as a whole office, but, a full set of collapsible wooden tv tray tables behind a door (we worked in a bank branch, the office was glass, and no one ever ate in there as we had a break room), a left tennis shoe (no right, occupant did have two feet), two YA novels, a change jar, one of those donut pillows you have to sit on after surgery, pads to put into a bra to make your assets appear more ample, one of those under-desk pedal exercise devices, and a cat toy (feathers on a string at the end of a stick…occupant did not have a cat, no customers ever brought a cat to the branch).

    1. Lee*

      We had several sets of those 4-piece TV tray sets in our office – but nice ones, kind of dark cherry colored to be used as side tables. The conference rooms had a huge center table with extra chairs around the perimeter of the room. Depending on type of meeting, we’d add in TV trays between chair to hold beverages or pull one out for the underling taking notes. They were very compact, easy to hide away when not in use.

  148. DEJ*

    I left a life-size cardboard cutout of a local sports star in my office when I left. I worked in a local entertainment capacity so although this was unusual it also wasn’t totally out of left field. I might have figured out something to do with it but I got laid off during Covid and was an emotional wreck when I came in during lockdown to clean out the office that I had been in for over 10 years, so I focused on the important stuff.

  149. HugeTractsofLand*

    I inherited a desk from a woman who had been at that job for 15 years (she’d finally retired to Florida). When I went through the drawers, I found them chock full of printed emails. There’d be one page for the initial reply, then a new page that had her reply to the reply, and so on- about student grade updates! When our (10 year old) online system automatically keeps a log of any grade changes and has a comment box for notes! She’d filled 2 standing file cabinets with the stuff. Usually I want to be conscientious and make sure I’m not throwing out anything important, but I unceremoniously dumped armfuls of paper into the recycling. It felt so freeing.

    Ironically, if Janice wanted some Florida warmth before retirement, she could have just burned all that correspondence.

    1. Elizabeth West*

      I just looked in the drawer where I’m sitting and there are a bunch of printed emails dated last year. They looked very boring so I left them. It’s all hotdesking here unless you’re in the office at least four days a week–whoever put them in the drawer might not even work here anymore.

  150. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

    This was 3 years ago. I cleaned out a space at work and found 6 cases of tractor feed paper. I put it in the recycling because we haven’t had a tractor feed printer since…the 80’s? One manager groused at me for throwing it out because he felt that if all of the laser printers broke all at once we might somehow find a working tractor feed printer and need the paper.

      1. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

        and do you really think that your computer has a driver for the random Tractor feed printer that you’re going to find on top of the supply cabinet?

  151. anotherfan*

    When we were a union shop (since disbanded), those who had been running the local office took a buyout right before COVID, leaving no information behind about the union or the contract. HR refused to let anybody know what the contract said, including the new editors. While clearing out a desk before we RTO, we found a copy of the contract crammed down between the back of the desk and the drawer. Surprise!

  152. L*

    I can’t think of anything particularly interesting I’ve found in a desk, but for the last few days the cleaning staff have been inexplicably leaving the previous day’s bag of garbage open on my desk.

  153. Lab Rat*

    We inherited our lab from a group that left in a rush. While cleaning out drawers, I kept finding open, loose scalpel blades, just thrown in amongst pens and thermometers and pipette tips. I ended up having to root through everything with a magnetic rod so I could find them without sticking my fingers in. It was very upsetting!

  154. NoIWontFixYourComputer*

    Not really a cleaning out the desk thing, but this kind of gave me a thrill.

    My employer subcontracted to a major aerospace firm, and I got sent there. This was circa 2004. In my office, I found my file cabinet to have a property tag with the original name of the company. This name had not been used since the ’60s. I was highly excited — for two reasons.

    1. This was a company and location that my father had worked for in the ’60s
    2. This was a company that was highly involved in the space program, and I was (and am) a huge space buff. So it was a personal kick to have something that was (sort of) directly connected to the ’60s space program.

  155. Skeptic53*

    When I retired from my medical practice I cleaned out my own desk and found all sorts of things once used but now obsolete: a Treo PDA, a Motorola Dynatac cellphone with two spare batteries and charger, two dictaphones, and the little tapes that went into them, an iPod, a Rolodex, floppy disks, a slide rule, and two head mirrors with leather straps (the round concave do-jobbies with the hole in the middle that cartoonists always draw on a person to show they are a doctor). Lots of CDs of obsolete software. The hardest was putting obsolete medical texts from 1980 into the recycle bin. I had called the used bookstores in the area and none wanted them. I donated my anatomy books (which don’t go obsolete).

    1. JMR*

      Hah, I had been hoarding a bunch of old science textbooks for the longest time, and I finally put them in my company’s White Elephant a few Christmasses ago. Our CEO ended up with The Molecular Basis of Blood Disease.

    2. Skeptic53*

      I never did figure out what to do with 6 white coats with my name embroidered on, with 4 different business names due to 3 successive mergers. I never wore them.

    4. NoIWontFixYourComputer*

      I have the same problem with old computer technology books. I hate getting rid of ANY books at all.

    5. ICodeForFood*

      I recently (finally) donated (to Green Drop) the engineering textbooks that my late husband insisted on bringing home when we had to clear out his father’s house in 1990… radio engineering books from the 1920s. I felt guilty getting rid of them, but really… what was I going to do with 100-year-old textbooks?

    6. ICodeForFood*

      I recently (finally) donated (to Green Drop) the 1920s engineering textbooks that my late husband insisted on bringing home when we had to clean out his father’s house in 1990. I felt guilty getting rid of them, but really, what was I going to do with 100-year-old engineering texts?

  156. FortunateMouse*

    I worked for a small business whose owners had both a long history on the property, and an inability to throw away anything that might be needed again. So in that light, the installation pack for IBM Disk Operating System 3.20 (complete with 5.25″ diskettes) was unusual but not inexplicable; someone probably stashed it in a drawer Just In Case and then no one opened the drawer again for thirty years. That sort of thing happened there.

    The dessicated head of garlic in the telecom closet, now, I have no explanation for that.

    2. Nonsense*

      I need you to understand that I read “dessicated head of garlic” as “dissected head of giraffe” and immediately believed you in that there is no explanation.

  157. JMR*

    You know that junk drawer we all have in our kitchen? I once took over an office from someone that had a junk drawer like that in her desk. It contained tons of rubber bands, pens, partially used rolls of Scotch tape, and a mountain of take-out menus, most of which were from restaurants that no longer existed. I cleaned out well over 100 packets of ketchup, soy sauce, sriracha, and Chick Fil A sauces.

    1. JustaTech*

      Back when I was in high school I would sometimes have to hang out at my dad’s office after school. One day, having finished my homework and not having access to the internet I decided to entertain myself by organizing the kitchen drawers. By the time I was done they had a chopstick drawer, a soy sauce packet drawer, a ketchup packet drawer and a red pepper flakes drawer.

      They ordered a lot of takeout.

  158. Emergency Pants*

    At my first mental health counseling job, I found a large pair of black fade jeans in the bottom desk drawer. When I tried to return them to the office’s previous therapist he just responded, “O those aren’t mine. The pants just come with the newbie desk. For emergencies I guess.” I never had to use The Pants, but definitely left them with no explanation when I switched jobs. I like to think they give new folks a good mystery to discuss with their coworkers.

  160. Nicky D*

    I am going the be the future topic of this. My old boss, who eventually was fired herself, threatened to fire me because as a Compliance Officer I found too many areas in which we were out of compliance in a highly state- and Federal-regulated field. After she threatened my job because I “need[ed] to look the other way” she sent me an email saying that I was “not a team player,” my attitude was not up to standards, and helpfully included a link to the Employee Assistance Program to deal with my issues. I have saved several copies, both hard-copy and digital, in files where it will look inadvertent. And fortunately, I had previously consulted a few attorneys in our general counsel’s office, which probably explains why I am going on Year 18 in my job and my boss is not.

  161. Jo*

    Opposite of “found”, what I left behind….

    When I retired, I cleared out my desk except for a sack of tiny plastic naked babies (plus a few pens and binder clips) in the pencil drawer. I thought it would be funny for whomever inherited by space.

    They were leftover from 15 years ago when we had an elaborate King Cake tradition. Bakery lost the order one day so had to quickly DIY by popping a cake baby into the bottom of a a large pastry. The store only sold them in a sack of 10, so that left nine tiny naked plastic babies to languish in my desk. (I once won a contest for “strangest, non-office supply item currently in your desk.) No one was left who recalled the King Cake days.

  162. Neuro-goose*

    I work in a neuroscience research lab. Found a bottle of strychnine powder in a desk drawer. Needless to say, conversations about where to store deadly poison were had at the next lab meeting.

  163. Avert your eyes*

    A desk drawer filled with nail clippings.
    Because apparently it was too hard to use a trash can (or keep the personal grooming at home).

  164. RVA Cat*

    Lordy, the printed out emails. I found two decades’ worth of them cleaning out my parents’ house to sell.

    1. Hannah Lee*

      Not a work find, but when going through some old boxes of stuff, I found a giant stack of printouts from a temp receptionist job I had decades ago.

      Page after dot-matrix-printed page of recipes I’d printed off a random Usenet message board. I don’t know what decades-ago me was thinking, because each one sounded less appetizing than the last, often with ingredients I don’t think I’ve ever liked.
      They ranged from 12 page incredibly complicated multi-day prep soups, stews and bakes
      to stupidly simple recipes, like
      Apple Jello:
      Step 1 Heat apple juice in sauce pan
      Step 2 Add plain gelatin and stir until dissolved
      Step 3 Chill until firm
      Step 4 Serve

      That job must have been super boring

    2. Not Australian*

      My mother hung onto a huge pile of paper which had come from her father’s business (he died in 1963) because she was going to use it ‘for shopping lists’. It was very difficult to convince her that she’d have to live to be about 2000 to use all that up at the rate of one sheet per week…

    3. My Brain is Exploding*

      Are you me? We found this at my in-laws’ house. To be fair, they had an email machine (NOT a computer), and, they are sort of interesting to look through now (like a diary for us!), but still…

  165. many bells down*

    oh lord…
    I work for a religious organization so I support a lot of ministers. One guy was leaving the organization and moving out of state. Now I got along great with “Rev. Bob”, but he’d alienated most of the staff and was frankly not great to work with. Especially since he never answered emails. “Rev. Bob is bad at email” was a mantra.

    So when he left I was tasked with triageing his literally thousands of unread emails so I could pass anything important to the minister who would be taking over. His contract wasn’t officially up until the end of the month, but he’d already left the state so I figured I’d get a jump on it a few days early by starting with the 400-ish emails he for some reason had in his Drafts folder.

    It was there that I discovered he’d been using his official, minister-branded work email to send HUNDREDS of incredibly pornographic emails to a former congregation member. I cannot convey to you how GROSS they were and I thank Isis that he didn’t know how to attach photos to email. Turns out Rev. Bob wasn’t actually bad at email, just his job.

    Anyway there was an investigation which went on forever because they kept uncovering more problems, and he was forced to retire and defrocked. All because he didn’t think to delete his drafts folder.

      1. many bells down*

        He definitely made an attempt to delete most of the incoming messages, but he’s a guy in his 70s and didn’t realize they’d be easy to restore. It did not occur to him to check his drafts or sent folders.

  167. AnotherOne*

    This wasn’t technically cleaning out a desk, but I feel like it fits.

    When I was working as an admin asst at a law firm after college, one of my colleagues went on vacation. While he was gone, something for the attorney he assisted became due so the admin covering went to his desk to check for it.

    As they went thru the desk, it quickly became evident this guy hadn’t been doing all of his work for quite awhile. Several people became tasked with going thru the entire desk to figure out what work was or wasn’t done. What client had or had not been told about stuff.

    When he came back from vacation, his work was all assigned to someone else and he was tasked with looking for another job. (As in, he actually had to come to the office, sit at his desk, and apply for jobs, reporting in to HR each day about his job search.)

  168. Lane716*

    Baby teeth. I worked at a residential facility for youth, and the kids in my building were young enough to lose their teeth. When I had started, the policy was to put them in a small envelope with the date and keep them in their item box in the office. When I moved to nights, I had time to go through the communal office desk and clean it out/up. I found several med cups of baby teeth in the very back of a drawer. No idea who they belonged to, as there was a relatively high turnover rate, and the facility had been open since the 60’s.

  169. spcepickle*

    The person who had my desk previously must have called his children – little potatoes. The children were both grown (one worked in a different department as both of us). There was a whole file folder of potato related cards, pictures, a coloring book. These were things like post cards from Idaho with a picture of a large potato and the note on the back read – Happy Mashing! From your little potatoes. It was both adorable and very odd.

  170. WindmillArms*

    At a new job, my desk had been vacated by an employee who left for another job. In the filing cabinet, she had printed out a bunch of dating profiles from local men and reviewed them in pen in the margins. Fun read!

  171. BigBird*

    For me it was a bottle of Tabasco sauce found in my new desk. I love Tabasco and would have used it, but a co-worker saw it on top of my table and said she remembered it from 8 years ago because it related to an office event that occurred right after her miscarriage.

  172. keys*

    Took over as a department head at a new library, found a box of keys in the old department head’s office. It was about 120 keys in total and no one knew what they were for, or why the DH had them. I thought maybe they collected keys? We reached out to her just to ask and she said she found them when she started the job almost 15 years prior and thought that they were important so she just kept them.

    Just to keep up tradition, I also kept the box of keys under my desk, just in case.

  173. Eeyore is my spirit animal*

    We were moving into a different office suite. The previous resident left behind two pickup loads of paper and a fermenting MRE. It had a pinhole puncture and was swollen up like a balloon. I don’t know how he stood the smell. Also half of the lights did not work or didn’t have light bulbs. People would come in and ask what did we do, it is so bright now. We replaced 22 light bulbs in a space for three offices and a bathroom.

  174. Hannah Lee*

    Cleaning out a spare room in our engineering dept to make way for a new employee –

    I found a dusty disposable camera, with most of the pictures taken. I decided to have the pictures developed in case they were forgotten but important (risky move, I know)

    Apparently the guy that worked for the cleaning service contracted at building decided to use our engineering manager’s cubicle for a photo shoot. It wasn’t a particularly interesting or photogenic space … 1980’s era brown/beige/grey portable partitions and work surfaces.
    It was shot after shot of him or a women I didn’t recognize, posed sitting at the desk or on it … in not particularly interesting or provocative poses, or clothes, sometimes wearing a fedora.
    No idea what they were going for there.

  175. russe11m*

    A company branded greeting card filled with neat handwriting repeating the phrase “PEEL OFF ALL YOUR SKIN”.

  176. RedinSC*

    We were cleaning out some storage lockers and found several 5 gallon buckets of Ultrasound Gel.

    Ummmm, this was a food bank!

  177. ManagerMom*

    Not a desk or office, but years ago I was responsible for handling the distribution of audit bags – think large briefcases on wheels for carrying lots of files out to client sites and back. There were about 40 of them kept in a mountainous stack next to my cubicle to be signed out to staff as needed, usually for weeks or months at a time. Well, the great “paperless office” transition happened and the audit bags became obsolete, which meant I had to go through and clean them all so they could be donated to a non-profit. I found so much loose change (here in Canada that includes $1 & $2 coins) that I was able to take my entire 10 person department out for lunch!

  178. Ama*

    Not terribly weird but when a former coworker left she left in the staff kitchen not one but two bagel slicers (she used to have a bagel for lunch every day). I happened to be in the kitchen when our office manager was reorganizing the cabinets and she decided while it would be nice to keep one, we really didn’t need two.

    Which is how I have been the happy owner of a bagel slicer for almost six years now.

  179. Summertime goals*

    In the Summer of 2007 I was temping in Washington DC at a nonprofit and was asked to clean out someone’s desk who had recently left… she had left behind a handwritten “self-improvement” list, the kind you write when you’re young and unhappy. At least one was find a new job! I also remember “Lose weight” was on there, save money, new roommate, “plan to go to graduate school,” that sort of thing. I am not 100% positive I replaced her position 1:1 but if I did, I understand why she was Not Happy and I wish her the best. (I remember her first name!)

  180. DeanOfD*ld*s*

    When I was an undergrad, and a freshman at that, I had a very eccentric professor who once joked in class about having been gifted a ::ahem:: double-ended marital aid that she kept in her top desk drawer. Later that day, I went to her office to borrow a book for a paper, and with one deft motion, she opened the drawer, pulled it out of its hiding place, and brandished it in my face. “See?! I wasn’t kidding!” She proclaimed with glee. Fast-forward about a decade, and I’d been working at my alma mater, now in a relatively senior role in academic administration. This professor had fallen into poor health and retired without returning to clean out her office, a task that fell to me and my assistant. When we got to her desk, I opened the drawer, and there was my old acquaintance… just as she’d left it. “See?” I said to my assistant, witheringly. “She wasn’t kidding.”

  181. Bunny Girl*

    We had a faculty member in our University Department that I’m pretty sure was forced to retire. He had a drinking problem, was never in the office, and as far as I could tell, never did anything. But he was tenured. Anyway, after he finally left, we needed his office space but I realized he didn’t really clean or take anything and had just left.

    He had taped a really charming comic about tenured professors getting to murder people without getting fired onto his door, and I also found a bunch of small fireworks in his drawers.

    Anyway, I don’t feel that bad that I once hid a dying bird in his office.

    1. JustaTech*

      Oh the tenure jokes!
      The first time I met my freshman advisor I walked up to hear him saying (to a group of other freshmen) “I could be chain sawing guinea pigs in the parking lot and there’s nothing they could do about it because I have tenure”.
      I had just had to leave my beloved guinea pig at home across the country and oh, yeah, it was less than a week after 9/11. Not the best way to meet the “real adult” who is supposed to be guiding you through your freshman year.
      (He actually turned out to be a pretty nice professor, just with a very particular sense of humor.)

  182. Bats In Our Belfry*

    One of our interns who had been tasked with clearing out old records approached a colleague and me with an empty file box containing the dessicated body of a bat! After we exclaimed over the find, the intern disappeared to “take care of it.” They returned a short while later and informed us they had disposed of the body in a dumpster across the street. When I expressed concern that the box could be traced to our employer, they assured me they had taken the precaution of putting the bat and the box in different dumpsters. Wow! Initiative and strategic thinking! I’m thrilled to report the intern was later hired to a permanent position. (Though I doubt they cited the bat incident in their interview.)

  183. old curmudgeon*

    I took my current government accounting position 13 years ago, replacing a guy who had retired on very short (less than two weeks) notice due to some shenanigans that the then-governor was trying to implement in the pension system.

    The position involves a niche area of accounting, very complex and weedy, which this gentleman had done for the agency for several decades. There was close to zero documentation or procedures written up for what he did – but he printed, stapled together and filed away MULTIPLE copies of every single spreadsheet he had ever updated for the work he did, filling multiple file drawers full to overflowing, to where they didn’t close fully because there was so much paper inside.

    The kicker was that every single one of those spreadsheets was also carefully stored on the agency’s server as well, which I discovered as I started sorting through the mountains of paper and looking for the source documents. It literally took me most of my first year in that position to go through all that detritus, confirm that there was an electronic copy, and then dump the paper into the shred barrel.

    In a small post-script to that saga, I myself am in the final few months of my career in advance of my retirement in December. Not only do I not have ANY paper files to leave for my successor, I no longer even have a desk or a filing cabinet – my agency went 100% remote during the pandemic and has stayed fully remote ever since. I have, however, written hundreds of pages of comprehensive procedures for every single task I perform, all of which are securely stored on the agency’s servers for my successor’s use as they learn their new role. It’s from a camping mantra that my late mother taught me – always leave your campsite in better shape than you found it, which I think should apply to workplaces as well as campsites.

  184. Paper Plate Monster*

    Not found, but left— I was told I had to move desks, and that my coworker would be getting my old one. I filled the many drawers with loose LEGOs.

    (We worked on LEGO-related work projects together, and she found it funny upon discovery. She also routinely decorated my desk with googly eyes, so it was a good natured revenge prank)

    1. I Have RBF*

      Some places I have worked that would have been seen as a golden treasure trove, because you could never have too many Legos.

  185. MuseumNerd*

    When I was cleaning out filing cabinets at my current job, I found over $2000 in undeposited checks from 2003. I could hear the frustrated eye roll over the phone when I called the finance department to ask what to do about them!

  186. HomerJaySimpson*

    When I was in the navy I got assigned to clean out an office for some civilian employee who had just retired. We found a gigantic box of discharge records all for violations of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.
    It was low key heartbreaking, but also just weird, because there wasn’t any good reason to keep paper copies of that in this person’s office.

  188. Sled dog Mama*

    Found a copy of the previous guy’s divorce settlement once, ex-wife must have had a good lawyer or some really good dirt or something because she got everything.

    Coolest thing was when I took over an office from a guy who passed away suddenly. All his personal items had been removed but there was a file cabinet of all the correspondence he had received going back to the 1960’s (This was in 2013). I found a sales brochure he had kept for the original production machine (prior to this everything was custom built) in the industry, listing the price as $10,000 in 1964. The equivalent top of the line machine goes for in the neighborhood of $3 million today.

  189. Iconic Bloomingdale*

    When my former director was reassigned from her position, transferred to another division and subsequently retired, she left a lot of stuff behind – piles of papers, junk and clutter. But when we were cleaning out her desk drawers, we came across several enema bottles. I wonder if she was using them at work. I guess I’d rather not know for sure.

    1. Unkempt Flatware*

      Bro……that’s so awful that if this happened to me in a bad season of my life, I might find the guy’s next employer and mail them to him saying, “you forgot these”.

  193. I am a patient girl*

    oooooh! in 2021 my relatively new to me manager (who worked in another state) visited my site as we hired another person on the team. He had a funny look on his face and he handed me an envelope. the day before he left on this trip he was assigned a new desk (very large open office floor) and when he opened the cubby drawer, it was empty aside from a single envelope…. containing a name tag with my full name on it. a previous manager in 2017 had ordered it for me when I started on the team and had been terminated shortly after and somehow this name tag floated around the office and made its way back to me, across the entire country!

  194. GoHomeSteve*

    When I started my new job, I was in a temporary office for a month. When I finally was able to move into my permanent desk, I started going through all the drawers to put my stuff away. When I opened on of the drawers there were cutouts of the face of the person I’d replaced (who had been gone for a few months) attached to popsicle sticks. There were at least half a dozen “Steve”-face sticks just hanging out in the drawer. Another coworker just came over, collected them and took them back to her desk.

  195. H.Regalis*

    From a friend of mine:

    His dad was a professor at a research university and had died quite suddenly of a heart attack, so in addition to cleaning out his dad’s house, my buddy had to clean out his dad’s office. This was in the late 1990s-early 2000s.

    Lots of things you’d expect—books, articles, white papers, files, awards, office supplies, etc.—and then in one corner under a bunch of stuff he found some old film reels. They weren’t labeled, but my friend is an AV geek so he had the equipment to both view them and digitize them. They turned out to be silent film porn from the 1920s, complete with intertitles! No clue where his dad got them or why they ended up in his office. They were shoved in a corner and weren’t in a box full of sex toys or anything.

      1. H.Regalis*

        He was not! His field was psychology. He wasn’t an uptight guy either, so it wasn’t like he kept porn in his office to hide it from his girlfriend.

    3. Wayward Sun*

      This is not nearly as salacious, but while cleaning out some old 3/4-inch videotapes at a public access TV station, I found one labeled “SHUTTLE.” I stuffed it into one of our remaining working Umatic VCRs, and it turned out to be a recording, off the air, of a live news broadcast of the first Space Shuttle landing. The tape was in pretty rough shape but I managed to pull a VHS copy for myself. It was so bad I had to clean the video heads after I was done because they were clogged with oxide that was shredding off the tape.

  196. Work Related Acquaintance*

    A Playboy magazine left behind by a fired employee who I already suspected was kind of a creep. So gross! I am not a germaphobe but I really wished I had gloves on when I was tossing out his stuff. I quietly tipped off the team member who relocated to the space and told her to be sure to take some Clorox wipes for a thorough cleaning before unpacking her stuff.

  197. Jigglypuff*

    An emergency toilet bucket

    When I started a job as a middle school librarian, I was given the keys to the library and sent on my merry way. I walked into a nightmare of a mess: books piled everywhere, carts full of books where I wasn’t sure if they were checked in yet, piles of VHS tapes, and on my desk was a toilet bucket.

    Upon further inspection I discovered that it was an emergency kit in case the students were trapped in the library with me – the bucket had first aid supplies and such in it, but the lid was a toilet seat and the bucket was designed to be used as a toilet in case of emergency. I took the toilet bucket off my desk and shoved in a corner and crossed all my fingers and toes that it would never have to be used.

  198. glt on wry*

    Sorting through a bunch of files about six months after a colleague of mine had left, I found some printed copies of pertinent ‘group information’ e-mails that I had never received. My name had been mysteriously erased from the cc group. It suddenly cleared up the reason I hadn’t been getting the relevant work information and why someone had said to me at the previous Christmas party, baffling me at the time, oh, I didn’t think you still worked here because you weren’t on the list anymore. Yes, ex-colleague and I had not always seen eye to eye…

  199. vettechanon*

    I worked at a vet’s office around 2016, and my last act before leaving was going through all the prescription cabinets to clean out old expired junk. I found a two way catheter cap, preserved in oil, clearly dated x/x/1971. Definitely not used anymore but not out of date, exactly. Honestly, I didn’t know what to do with it, so I just put it back – hopefully the oldest thing hanging around there!

  200. JustaTech*

    Cleaning out the document room in preparation for a major building renovation I hear “Hey, JustaTech, you used to be a librarian, right?”
    “Sorta, sure. Why?”
    “Do you know what this thing is?”
    Friends, it was a microfiche machine. Not one but two of them. Two different ones, taking two different kinds of microfilm. There were also several boxes of microfilm of archived lab notebooks.

    The microfilm was not compatible with either reader, both of which were broken.

    1. JustaTech*

      To clarify, the company was not 100 years old. It was founded in the 1990’s, so just before digitization, but after the heyday of microfilm.

      1. BigBird*

        We still consult microfilm for old employment records. We have probably 100 linear feet of it if it were laid out end-to-end. Amazing to me how many times a month I am looking for someone’s file in there!

      2. Madame Arcati*

        My university library had working microfiche machines which I used myself in the late nineties to look at older material, newspapers maybe. It was totally still a thing!

  201. pally*

    This is more sad than weird.

    Small company. Management had fired yet another order entry clerk. Reason: they just weren’t working out.

    CFO decided to hire a friend of hers for the position. Yeah, don’t hire friends and think supervising them is going to work. To be fair, the friend did have extensive customer service experience.

    Two years later, CFO fires her friend. And now they are no longer friends. No surprise.

    When we went through the desk drawers, we found them all stuffed with paper tablets- full sized ones, half-sized ones, yellow, white, grey. File cabinet drawers jammed full as well. Every page was filled out. There were detailed instructions on how to process each customer.

    Turns out the CFO was a micromanager. She issued instructions for how to process orders without any rhyme or reason. So the friend resorted to writing out the instructions-every time. The friend complained about this -in confidence to me – but didn’t want to cause waves as she needed this job.

    Only thing, the instruction that was given for each specific customer changed each time a subsequent order was submitted. Sure enough, this was all logged in on the tablets we found. I don’t think the CFO even looked at the tablets to see this. It was a running log of all the different things CFO had the friend do to complete each customer’s order. It made no sense.

    Talk about abuse of power! And no one thought to step in and streamline things. Or to rein in the CFO.

  202. Sam M*

    A 2018 clearout of one of the offices in our university’s Astronomy group uncovered an unopened bottle of East German vodka. Even had “Made in the USSR” on it: https://imgur.com/a/6419rHd

    There was a group tradition that everyone who passed their PhD got a fancy bottle of booze (usually whiskey) for the viva party, signed it and left it on the shelves, so for decades nobody had batted an eye at it – it was just another ancient bottle.

  203. Dr. Hyphem*

    When I was in my Master’s program, all of the Master’s students shared a large office with about a dozen cubes, and each cube had 2-3 people but desks weren’t assigned. It was fairly common for people to just leave anything they didn’t want to take, but my desk/file cabinet was the weirdest. Things left included: a black dress and really pretty lace shawl (I wound up keeping the shawl), candles (like standard taper candles, not jar candles), matches, a large kitchen knife, and cat treats. I handed over the knife to the main office because it was likely there because someone brought food, but it was still rather large and scary.

    Weirder yet—it was a two year program, so the second years knew whose desk it was before me and they reached out and no one who used the desk ever used the file cabinet, which created a chain of people reaching out to previous cohort/desk occupants for like five years and no one knew who the items belonged to.

  204. GigglyPuff*

    Government position: when I started someone had left a small bottle of holy water and a couple prayer cards. I used the holy water to water my office plant.

    Years later I also ended up cleaning out our units offices, records dating back older than me, so many hiring applications, disciplinary correspondence, and an interesting printed out email thread from an employee with a challenging personality that was like 8 pages long. Did I mention this was an archives? Think I filled six full trash pages worth of shredded material with PII alone.

  205. Fisher82*

    My husband once found a molar in the drawer of a desk he moved into. He knew the guy who had the desk before and said he wasn’t that surprised. I had so many questions but didn’t want to hear the answers to any of them…

  206. Wearer Of Many Hats*

    I work in a small-ish nonprofit and our ED left in the middle of a major project. Since no one else bothered I started to clean out his office, separating needed documents from things that could be trashed (he was big into printing anything possible.)

    I found ALL of his performance reviews and salary negotiations. Very enlightening to see what the board set as his goals and how he scored vs. what the day-to-day operations actually looked like. During his less than 10-year tenure his salary increased about $20,000 which was infuriating because when I was promoted he haggled with me over a $2,000 increase.

  207. shamwow*

    A few mysteries I never got to unravel:

    1. An employee who was clearly miserable went on indefinite leave with no explanation. He was constantly late and never got much done (he spent a lot of time watching football on his work computer) and after a few years of this his manager finally started having expectations of him, which he understandably resented. During his leave (which we all thought was permanent) a few of us cleaned out his desk. In addition to clothes and food items, he had painstakingly scratched “THIS JOB WILL KILL YOUR SOUL” into the back of a ruler.

    2. A restaurant I managed was moving locations, and I was left to clean out the closet. Found a coffee grinder (this place did not serve coffee, but we used them for grinding peppercorns sometimes), a tripod, and an ipod. I still use the coffee grinder and the ipod.

    3. Not an office, but in high school we had to clean out the storage space for old props because the building was being torn down. It was called ‘the cage’ because it was just a weird corner of the basement behind a locked metal gate. We found 4 unused toilets buried underneath the costumes and old sets.

  208. Wilbur*

    A big box of VHS and what I think were Betamax tapes that were used to record test data. Boss wouldn’t let me throw them out, so I sent them to our librarians who were supposed to have all kinds of equipment to handle that kind of stuff. Never heard anything back from them.

  209. Bartleby the scribbler*

    I’m kinda disturbed by the sheer number of people who apparently clip their nails into their desk drawers.

  210. VivaVaruna*

    Pretty tame, but I opened a drawer to find that it was full of half-empty water bottles. The brand was not one we kept in the office, so someone must have brought them from home. Apparently they weren’t from the person immediately before me, either, meaning they knew they were there and never cleaned them out, or never opened the drawer to find them.

  211. Ama*

    When I left my last in office job and cleaned out my desk I did finally get an answer to where all the small things that kept going missing in my cubicle were going (most importantly a couple copies of the bathroom key and once, my office ID). Apparently the top drawer in my desk had a gap on one side between it and the side of the actual drawer unit, and things that were small and kind of flat could easily tip out the very low side and fall down into the bottom drawer (where they were covered up by the tote bags I kept down there).

    My employer had become more stingy about handing out individual bathroom keys in the last years before I left in 2022 (if you hadn’t been employed in 2018 — the last time someone made copies for all the new employees — you had to use one of the “office copies”) so I gifted my extra ones to some newer employees who were very happy to have them.

  212. tabloidtained*

    Why!! so!! many!! fingernail clippings!!

    Let this be a reminder to me to clean out my desk regularly. Wouldn’t want anyone to find my infinite stash of soy sauce packets.

  213. Rep (taylor’s version)*

    Fingernail clippings in a drawer from the office fingernail clipper after he retired.

  214. ICodeForFood*

    In 2003 or so, I took a job as a contractor at a large well-known pharmaceutical firm. It was IT work, so this is not a lab story. I was given a desk that had belonged to a contractor who was let go for things like disappearing for 3 to 4 hours at a time during the work-day. In her desk drawer I found unopened ketchup packets, a lot of change (mostly pennies), and a freshwater pearl bracelet in a flannel case. I tried to get ahold of her to return it, but wasn’t able to. I don’t remember what I wound up doing.

  215. Snubble*

    I am baffled by just how many of these stories involve carefully hoarded nail clippings. I’m not even particularly bothered by nail clippings. I just don’t understand why so many people feel driven to keep them.

    1. dontbeadork*

      With teeth or nail clippings you can take control of someone so it’s very important that you keep them away from the sorts of people with that power, who are probably your managers.

      Logically, you’d take them with you, but maybe they think if you’re not an employee you won’t be magicked into obedience?

      Yeah, I don’t get it either.

      1. Zephy*

        OK, if we’re playing by fae rules, the inverse of that has even worse implications: the nail clippings did not belong to the prior occupant of the office.

        1. I Have RBF*

          Yikes! Clippings from every manager, carefully collected and bespelled as a group?

          Or collected at random from wastebaskets because the wizard wants a zombie army?

          /s

    2. Skeptic53*

      I think I know the answer to the hoarded nail clipping mystery. When I clip my nails at home, I have a very small plastic wastebasket that I put on my lap and clip the nails into. In an office, most wastebaskets are much bigger. You would have to either bend over the wastebasket (which I did if I had to clip nails at work), or clip the nails onto the top of the desk and sweep them into the wastebasket. MUCH easier to just open the drawer and clip away. Of course, it’s a hassle to get the clippings out of the drawer, so folks just leave them. It’s a combo: laziness + grossness = drawer full of clippings.

  216. Jshaden*

    About a year and a half ago they redid carpet and repainted the walls in our building. We have a small number of staff in the building, but it is primarily a temporary use space for the teams we support, so the permanent staff had to clean out all the desks in the flex use rooms. In theory no one should have had stuff in them, but of course there was. In addition to the expected trash like used tissues/napkins, years out of date sealed snacks, and enough binder clips to last until the heat death of the universe, the two grossest finds were a desiccated whole banana and a coffee mug encrusted with spit out sunflower seeds. Those came out of different rooms, and had been in the desk drawers for a long and indeterminate amount of time. Still do not understand how the banana ended up mummified rather than an moldy pile of goop, but I suppose we shouldn’t complain.

    1. Jshaden*

      Huh. I didn’t even think to include the amount of nail clippings, but yeah, we found a lot of those too.

  217. MistressBarkness*

    Our office went remote from 2020 to 2022 or so. During that time, my boss quit and I took her job (and office).

    I found mortgage documents, her husband’s paystubs, printed out blog posts, her ID badge that had been “missing” for years, and tampon wrappers. Just the wrappers (thankfully?). I think about those wrappers a lot. Why??

    Bonus: since we left abruptly in March 2020, nothing got cleaned out. I was the lucky one who got to discover what happened to coffee grounds left in the coffee maker for several years. I also discovered a can of soda that had sat in a drawer so long, the contents had leached out without the can ever being punctured or opened. It was also moldy.

  218. Worldwalker*

    When I finally got my own desk at a long-ago job, after its former owner got a better office and desk, I found a large pile of porn magazines he’d left in the drawer. (not Playboy, sadly; those are worth something to collectors) I guess I’m a bit evil; I called across the operations room “Hey, John, what do you want me to do with those [magazines] in the desk drawer?” The fellow in question was one of those super-pale blonds … the color he blushed was remarkable. Yeah, that’ll teach him to keep a stash of Larry Flynt’s magazines!

  219. TheActualA*

    This is probably going to be low-key compared to what some of you had but at a job a couple years ago I replaced someone who had been fired for a list of quite reasonable reasons and one day I spent two hours sorting through a large drawer of his various papers. It looked like someone had taken the drawer and shook it because there was literally no order to the papers, not by date or any kind of any system. There were random receipts which should have been entered into the “accounting system”, his old pay stubs, tax and other notices from the state and/or county, websites which had been printed onto paper and various sundry but the thing that baffled me the most was that this guy packed up his JUNK MAIL from home to bring to this drawer. Why?

  220. Caz*

    Extremely tame by comparison, but…

    I worked in a payroll office and my manager was a packrat. There was a change in higher management and the new boss was the opposite – if it wasn’t necessary that it be kept, it would be gone! She scheduled a Destruction Day, when we would come in in casual clothes and…well, destroy.

    We started comparing how old we were when this or that piece of paper was printed – “oh, I was a teenager” – ” oh, I was in school” – the usual. Someone turned to me and asked how old I had been when a memo was printed…”Um…that was before I was born”.

    Much destruction was done. Even the packrat boss felt better for it.

  221. The Engineer*

    Years ago, I was an assistant at a non-profit that was preparing to move offices. The nonprofit was historically focused and situated in a huge historic building, and the process of downsizing to a sleeker, more modern office space was a terrific undertaking. All of the assistants spent months cleaning out gobs of junk from unused offices and cabinets.

    Being 23 and poor, I couldn’t stand to see all of this unceremoniously dumped. So I arranged a Stuff Swap with the other assistants, where we’d put aside all of the reusable items that weren’t cut out to be moved and then booked the main conference room for a day to lay out the stuff. Anyone in the building could take anything they wanted.

    I left with a full set of wine glasses. Tons of reviewer-copies of books sent to the former CEO. All sorts of office supplies. Some weird art. Etc.

    I don’t think the current CEO thought too highly of me personally making off with a *lot* of stuff, but whatever. I used those wine glasses forever.

  223. Rocky's Boots*

    I work in higher ed IT and it’s pretty common to find obsolete stuff that no one has bothered to dispose of. I started collecting some of the more interesting stuff and setting it up in a corner of my office so that the younger students could see how things used to be. So far I have a complete Apple II setup, cartridge tapes used in the early 90s to distribute UNIX software, and an “octopus” monitor cable from the days before connectors were standardized. The building itself has abandoned cable from at least three previous network installations; it was built in the 1970s, after our campus joined the ARPANET, so networked computing was already a big deal.

    1. NoIWontFixYourComputer*

      An original Apple II? Or a IIc or a IIe?. The originals are probably worth a reasonable amount.

      1. Rocky's Boots*

        Apple IIe, non-enhanced version, with a Monitor III and two Disk II drives. Not especially valuable — the IIe had a ten year production run and they made six million of them!

  224. Paris Geller*

    Started a new job in 2018. Set about organizing my space & cleaning out the desk. I, much like story in the post, found printed out emails from the late ’90s complete with notes. I also found several floppy disks. I showed them to my coworkers. I was in my late 20s at the time so I had briefly used floppy disk in elementary school, but a few of my younger coworkers had never seen one before. I knew I was AT LEAST the fourth person to have that desk since 2000 (and it had gone through a move to a new building!!) so I guess no one else thought to explore the filing cabinets?

    1. Office Chinchilla*

      I found a half-full box of floppy discs when my office was moving. I had a brief “museum of ancient technology” while we were cleaning up the space (a labelmaker where you’d turn the dial until the letter you wanted then pull a trigger to imprint it on the tape, some overhead transparencies, etc.) then I brought them home. I call them my retirement account. (I think they’re worth about $10 ea now? Not enough to retire on.) We had also only moved into that space a couple years prior, so apparently it had all already moved with us once.

  225. Freebird*

    Warning this is gross.

    I quit an awful job at a museum (yay!) but I stay in contact with my former coworkers who are still trapped there. There was an archivist in the building who I had a bad vibe about. He asked out a coworker twenty years younger, and one time he spent an entire lunch break describing people who got grievous injured in professional wrestling.

    After I left he apparently harassed a new docent and got fired. They got a new archivist (who is normal and professional) and my friend has been helping them go through the archives. In the former archivists desk they found a drawer filled with fingernail clippings.

    But don’t worry! He labeled the drawer and made sure the fingernails were archived according to our systems

  226. lindoreda*

    I’m a science teacher. I got moved to a different school midyear, and the previous teacher left a lot of stuff in the room. I found class pictures from fully 10 years ago, there’s a cabinet labeled “dangerous chemicals,” but my winner is the unlabeled, foul-smelling container full of preserved sheep brains.

  227. Admininja*

    Cleaning out a fired employee’s desk, I found her complete mortgage package. It had copies of her birth certificate & social security card, bank account info, old addresses, her mother’s full name- everything I’d need to steal her identity & money. I shredded the lot.

  228. tangawarra*

    Not at work, but halls of residence. When someone moved out they had to clean the rooms and then the university would have it painted before the next person moved in. (Note: people would ususally only stay for one year) When I moved in I wanted to store some stuff on top of a hanging cupboard. I found some boxes of ramen that had expired several years before. Either the room hadn’t been painted in at least five years or the painters had put the ramen back each time. Also, this was at a time when you were still allowed to smoke indoors, so painting was really really necessary.

  230. Eye in the sky*

    This isn’t exactly a “cleaning out a desk” story, but I once worked for a chain of small casinos doing support work, mostly security camera repairs. One day I walked into my manager’s office and there was this really nice print of a Titanic poster. I said, “oh, that’s nice” and she said, “do you want it? Get it out of my sight and it’s yours.” One of the casino managers had hung it up and she’d confiscated it as being bad luck. (I’m not sure if SHE thought it was bad luck, or if she was afraid our patrons would think it was bad luck. Gamblers are superstitious.) As I carried it out, I heard her mutter, “what’s next, putting up CLOCKS?”

    I still have that poster. It looks great in my dining room.

  231. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

    This didn’t happen to me, but to one of my customers. And they loved telling the story, and asked us to do a custom screensaver based on the theme if possible.

    Military facility, secured computer room. Really, really secured. When they had to pull up a bunch of the raised floor segments to run new cabling, they found a huge stash of empty Twinkie wrappers. Somehow a rat had gotten into the room. It would crawl up the back of the cheap government metal desks, snag a Twinkie out of a brown paper lunch bag in the top drawer, and then sneak down under the floor to enjoy his snack.

    The rat was a legend.

  232. Lexi Vipond*

    An invoice from the university caterers for £0.00, down the back of a chest of drawera! Not very exciting, but mildly amusing at the time.

  233. One Story of Many*

    I worked in fundraising for a museum that had plenty of history in its own right (building from the 1890s that had been a museum since the 1940s), so we found all sorts of random things in desks, corners of the basement/attic, etc. The most entertaining thing I discovered in my desk was a sheet of file folder labels with instructions on which side to feed into the typewriter, but the worst(?) thing I came across was only 15-ish years old… I was cleaning out a storage box with records from a fundraising event in the early 2000s. It was full of folders for each attendee, including copies of their bid cards (why on earth those needed to be stored I have no idea), which I flipped through before tossing in the shred bin. About halfway through the box, one folder turned out to also contain $50 in cold hard cash. Carefully filed away for a rainy day, I guess?

  234. Caz*

    Moving a team from three small offices to one larger one (oh happy day).

    Each of the smaller offices – which neighboured each other, they were not spread about inconveniently – had kept their own supply of envelopes, which I had the joy of combining.

    Boxes and boxes and So Freaking Many boxes of envelopes.

    The team in one office had insisted they were about to run out and needed more ordering. i had insisted right back that nothing was getting ordered until the office move was complete.

    We didn’t order envelopes for a year.

  235. A perfectly normal-size space bird*

    35 million year old alligator poop. I worked at a paleontology site and someone had checked it out of storage and forgot to put it back. Apparently it had been missing for several years and no one bothered to look in the file drawer. I was given a certificate to commemorate my first fossil find.

  236. Deb*

    This was not a new desk, but one morning circa 2003 I came into work and there were a few CDs on my desk. They were the kind you buy blank and burn. One had the latest White Stripes album, one had “Dance Dance Dance” by The Beach Boys about 25 times in a row. I don’t remember anymore what all was on there. The desk was just mine, but the office was staffed 24 hours a day, so multiple people would have had access to my desk. At first, I thought the things were left by mistake and sent around an email asking whose they were. No one responded except for one guy who said he liked the White Stripes and asked if he could have that CD. I chalked it up as weird, but a few weeks later, it happened again. I sent another email, but again, nothing. In the end, I had about 12 CDs with random music on them, so random that it wasn’t weird enough to be creepy or funny enough to be a practical joke. I never found out who was doing it.

  237. School Counselor Life*

    When I took over my office in my new school a few years ago, I found a hair dryer. Turns out the school counselor who worked here before me would often arrive to work with her very long hair still wet and would spend first period drying it.

    (I emailed her to see if she wanted it back; she did not reply. A few weeks later, an office staff member mentioned her hair dryer had died that morning and I happily offered her my bonus office hairdryer, and was rid of it forever.)

  238. Disgusted, England*

    Once a colleague left his UNDERPANTS over the back of a colleague’s chair.

    She was his direct report.

    H cycled to work and back so he changed clothes at work. He was laughing, embarrassed, but thought it was funny.

    The pants, I am told, were not clean.

    This is pants in British, underpants, not trousers.

    This was so in keeping with his behaviour that it wasn’t even that shocking to people.

  239. Esme_Weatherwax*

    I had to clean out the desk of an executive director of a research center. The files were 1) all paper, no electronic versions of anything, and 2) labeled with categories such as “weird”, “stuff”, and “weird stuff.” Eventually I threw everything away as there was no way to figure out where any of it came from or what it related to.
    The ED had been fired for poor performance and I think I discovered why.

  240. Bibliothecarial*

    How many librarians does it take to change a lightbulb? 2. One to change the bulb and the other to cart the old bulb off to a remote storage facility.

  241. EvilQueenRegina*

    Not a desk but a computer: an employee had transferred to another department, but no one had removed her access to our team’s shared files. While trying to rescue something that got dragged and dropped into the wrong file by accident, I found applications for quiz and dating shows (including one for this person’s ex-boyfriend), job applications, something to do with a flight to Hong Kong for this person’s mother and lots of random photos.

    In another job, someone found muddy football boots belonging to his predecessor.

    1. anon for this*

      A junior professional in our firm left, supposedly to help look after their aging parents. On their (company) computer, we found months of files and docs relating to their plans to start their own business in direct competition — prep work done on our equipment and on company time — plus piles of sensitive and proprietary data on our clients, to make poaching easier.

      The dear departed had attempted to hide their tracks by . . . putting the files in the recycle bin. Which had not been emptied.

      1. Expelliarmus*

        What ended up happening? Did the former employee’s business end up posing a threat at all? Or, for that matter, did the business even get off the ground?

  242. Regular Human Accountant*

    Cleaned out the desk of an AP clerk and found a stack of unprocessed vendor invoices, dating back months.

  243. Someone Online*

    A ruler from a pharmaceutical company with a dosage chart for a certain antipsychotic medication.

  244. Cee*

    On my very first day as a professional archivist, I found a box of human teeth. Like, a lot of teeth. Maybe 200 or so.

    I was working a university that had a dental school but still was not prepared for human remains on day one.

  245. H*

    Found notes from every interview the previous 3-4 managers had done covering about 20 or so years. Not in a locked area. Some with very interesting and concerning comments, such as things not relevant to an interview. When I called HR I discovered why. I was told to keep any interview notes in case of a dispute or complaint ( unionized, Canada) and when I pointed out some were so old was told “ well we don’t want them”. Threw most of them out. Was amused to read the notes from my own interview: after 3 questions one person wrote something like “I am not writing any more, this who I want”!

  246. Guacamole Bob*

    Does this thread give anyone else an intense desire to clean and declutter their own desk or office?

    3. Jasmine*

      Yes!

      When my husband and I go on vacation I always think, if we die in a plane crash who would clean out our house and what would they find?

  247. So many nail clippings!*

    So many tales of drawers full of nail clippings! Seems very intentionally passive(?) aggressive — like none of these offenders had a trash can in their office/near their desk? And who needs to clip their nails so often? I have a nail file that only comes out for snags or broken nails and I would never put a broken nail in my desk drawer.

  248. Three Owls in a Trench Coat*

    A colleague and I recently cleaned out a new-to-our-department storage closet. Desk calendars from the 80s, typewriter tape, carbon papers, 8″ floppies, old papers from a Ditto or Mimeograph copier, ancient legal forms with triplicate backings, embossing notary seals (long since expired), a couple of old stenotypes, and other office supply relics from the past.

  249. Former Retail Lifer*

    Alison, there should be a dedicated post to just those involving fingernail clippings. There are a DISTURBING number of people finding those.

  250. Plebeian Aristocracy*

    I was helping a retiring colleague clean out his old office closet. There was all kinds of stuff in there: weird books, odd statues, some *very* interesting paintings. It just seemed like folks threw whatever they didn’t want in there, because it wasn’t really being used anyway.
    By far the most intriguing thing we found in there was a box of Ritz crackers that had expired a decade previous. It was unopened, in mint condition, like some post apocalyptic movie joke.
    So, naturally, I tried one.
    Dear readers of AAM comments section, it was a strange experience. The salt was perfectly preserved. The insides, even after all of this time, were crunchy and flaky in the exact same way. And if that’s all a Ritz was, then all would have been well. But those things are covered in butter, which in the intervening years had decided to go rancid. Not moldy, not fuzzy, not slimy, but nevertheless absolutely rancid.
    And so, I learned my lesson. By all accounts, follow your curiosity, but don’t be afraid to spit out what’s definitely not good for you.

  251. Forrest Rhodes*

    Add me to those who are stunned at the number of “I found nail-clippings” stories. Is this a thing—saving your nail clippings—that totally un-hip and non-trendy me just doesn’t know about? Is there a serious and widespread danger of one’s nail clippings being used to, I don’t know, place a curse on one’s family or something? In all the years that I’ve been clipping nails, not once have I ever considered saving the trimmings!

    2. NotSoRecentlyRetired*

      In the ’80s, I had a coworker who would cut his toenails at work. But the clippings went into the trash can.

  252. Prudence and Wakeen Snooter Theatre for the Performing Oats*

    First day at a job, I was organizing the drawer in my cubicle when I found a package of Fun Dip candy. I used to looooove that stuff and even though it was expired… several years expired….I was still contemplating eating it. Then I found toenail clippings in the drawer and decided nah.

  253. Stephanie*

    I work in public education. Our program moved buildings this past year. One of our teachers transferred to a different building in the same district after the end of the school year. She had gone through her things and taken what she wanted before school year started. When we were unpacking, I took on the task of going through her file cabinet and purging anything that we didn’t need. I found printed emails discussing students who were long gone, sent to staff who were also no longer working with us. I also found invoices from her OBGYN. I have no idea why she kept those in her school filing cabinet. Sheesh.

  254. Elizabeth West*

    Not a desk, but once someone left a very nice pair of Liz Claiborne sunglasses at a cafe where I worked. We kept them in a lost-and-found box for a week, but the customer never returned for them, so my boss said I could have them. I wore them for about two years before I accidentally sat on them and broke the frames.

  255. AndersonDarling*

    I found a sterile suit tucked behind my desk. Like the kind you would wear into an operating room. My desk had locked drawers and I was never able to use them, and eventually I was given a new desk and when we moved it out of place, the blue ‘bunny suit’ was stuck between the desk and the cubicle wall.
    I’m glad I never opened the drawers in the old desk.

    1. Wayward Sun*

      Confession: I have inherited desks with locked drawers and no keys, and I have either picked or disassembled every one of those locks. Sadly, I never found anything interesting.

  256. AstridInfinitum*

    I worked at a history museum that had a storage room that housed a lot of early childhood program materials. We were tasked with cleaning it out to become our team’s office. We knew there was some weird stuff in there but the one thing that takes the cake was a file cabinet entirely filled with pinecones. Pinecones. We had plenty of pine trees on the grounds and probably didn’t need to keep such a massive collection for the one time a year they were used for a craft.

  257. Anonforthis 2024-10-31*

    Not so much gross as weird…

    Before my previous boss left I recall asking my coworker if [Boss] was having issues with her cats…she often smelled like cat urine. Coworker agreed and we both decided not to say anything because it wasn’t always so maybe the cat just missed the box one day? Then I noticed her office smelled like cat urine, too, but hey, again, maybe she just left the smelly sweater or something there.

    Anyway, Boss was let go and her office was left closed and locked for a couple months before I was tasked with cleaning her desk for the replacement. Opened that door and good L…it smelled. I started cleaning and could find nothing to explain the smell until I opened one drawer and found dozens and dozens of loose vitamins that had escaped their daily dose packs and were slowly decaying/melting into the drawer. I grabbed a pair of latex gloves but the smell settled into my skin, clothes, hair, and sinuses: dank cat pee was all I could smell for the rest of the day.

    Eventually found more open vitamin packs in one of her lab coat pockets, too.

    Still want to know what was in those vitamins.

  258. ChatGPT*

    Our company’s C-suite had made a fatal business decision that led to us being sold to a competitor. About 12 employees moved to new company location after the sale and joined about 25 who worked for new company. We were always looked down upon by our new colleagues as though it was all our fault that our leadership had screwed up. This in spite of the fact that our folks were vastly more technically proficient than new company’s people and our closed branch was vastly more profitable than the new company’s branch.
    There was one woman in particular at new company who was sweet in person, but I swear probably carried a shiv in her purse she was so cutthroat. She thankfully retired about three years after the merger and as I was readying her old desk for a new employee I found her old printout of an email to new company’s staff with the names of all of the sold company folks who were moving to join the combined staff. She had been crossing out names of the transplants as they resigned from what was a nightmare of workplace.
    Not the most egregious thing in and of itself, but it really crystallized for me the reality that we were not welcome. Bite me, Judy.

  259. Ms. Rogerina Meddows*

    I relate to the anecdote about the printed e-mails. When I began my current job two years ago, my desk still had my predecessor’s items on it on my first day (he was abruptly fired, and my manager was training a second new employee and didn’t have time to clean the space ), and while cleaning out the desk and workspace over the next few weeks, I found that my predecessor had printed out EVERY. SINGLE. E-MAIL. he had received during his 16-month tenure. Everything from casual, 1-2 line followups, to order confirmations, to marketing e-mails, to long, unwieldly threads related to event planning. While I did pick up a lot of institutional knowledge from sorting thorugh all of those printed e-mails, it was still baffling as to why my predecessor felt the need to print EVERY e-mail he ever received. In 2021 and 2022!!

  260. Lyudie*

    Mine are all pretty tame compared to some of the stories here. Years ago, I was working temporarily in a different building and they gave me an office that was being used as storage. I found about a dozen laptops (presumably dead) in the overhead storage and drawers. The other desk in the office was much the same.

    When I moved into my last cube, the person before me apparently didn’t clean out anything. In addition to the expected pens, post-it flags, and hanging file folders, there were brand new/unwrapped note blocks (those ones with a hole for a pen and printing on the side) that had company logos and slogans from about ten years before, plus an amazing amount of ketchup, salt, and pepper packets. Handfuls of ketchup packets. A quart ziplock bag stuffed with salt and pepper and more in the paper clip and pen slots of the desk organizer. Just so much salt and pepper.

  261. TooMuchOfAManager*

    Seeing a lot of nail clippings being found in desk drawers. I think some cultures/traditions have rituals around nail clippings where they need to be burned or buried or disposed of in some very specific way. Same with hair. Still, a very odd thing to leave in a desk drawer, to be sure.

    1. I Have RBF*

      See, if they are keeping them for ritual disposal, they should store them in a ziploc bag or something, so that they can periodically take them and do their ritual. OTOH, I would be more worried about the misuse of paper with PII on it than nail clippings.

  262. Adds*

    I found a copy of a marriage license that was not the previous desk occupant’s, and they were not a party to it in any way.

    I also found some old hard candy and a bunch of mouse poop but that was not too much of a surprise and kind of to be expected for the location.

  263. The Muffin Is A Lie*

    One time I had to visit a branch office of my company and my boss in that location reserved a desk space for me. It was in a vacant and clearly rarely used office. When I went in, there was a big white board and the only thing it said was “There is a muffin in the drawer.” Obviously, I immediately investigated and there was, in fact, NOT a muffin in the drawer. Since this office was clearly not used often, I was equally happy and disappointed to find that there was not a drawer muffin.

  264. Pixel*

    At the previous job, my co-workers regaled me with stories of when the company had moved into the building — apparently the previous resident manufactured prosthetics, for people with gentleman parts, and they left behind boxes of their vendor samples. Which were doll-sized.

  265. Marzipan Dragon*

    Mine are dull compared to most of these. At my first job my desk contained five file folders, each labeled in a different handwriting “Things I don’t know where to file.” I think the funniest one was the desk of a coworker who, in the days before fidget toys, would pick up small supply items off people’s desks when he spoke to them to occupy his hands. We found out when we went to empty his desk that he never returned anything. The first drawer we opened was full to the top with paper clips. There wasn’t a bit of space left for even one more paper clip. Someone can do the math but we were staring at maybe a million clips? The other drawers were in the same state with pens, pencils, rubber bands, etc. I guess at least he kept everything separate so we didn’t have to sort.

  266. My cat is the employee of the month*

    As a temporary contractor, I was asked to go through a former employee’s network files. There was an ongoing layoff, and IT backed up the employee’s drive several times after they noticed that the he had deleted a lot of data. I was warned that there might be some personal information in the files by my manager. In amongst the data that was needed by the company, there were a lot of personal files. The guy had been using his work laptop for personal use. He should have known better, but I was also warned that he might not have been the most reliable person. Luckily the pictures were of his lake house and nothing weird. However, there were multiple character reference letters from friends and family. Turns out that he had been charged with a crime and the character references were all saying that he was a good person and it had all been an accident. I, being nosy, read them all and got a few too many details about this guy and his spouse. I have fortunately forgotten his name, because I’d totally be tempted to look up what he’s up to now.

  268. Anon Again... Naturally*

    Way back in graduate school, my less-than-prestigious department was moved from our existing building in the center of campus to a building on the edges so a more important department could take our space. We had multiple research labs to move, and of course it all took much longer than we thought. It was the day before we lost access to the space and we only had the last storage room to empty, but people gradually left. When we were down to the last few people the remaining professors suggested that since we were clearly into the ‘nobody has touched this stuff in decades’ portion of the room, we leave it as the new department’s problem. I told them I could finish up, but I got first dibs on anything interesting I found. They agreed, and my husband and I kept going.

    The next day, my tiny graduate student office had two barrister bookcases, a vintage roll top desk, and an assortment of vintage scientific glassware for decorations. The professors all honored my claim until I graduated a year later, although I understand that when I graduated the department head claimed everything for his office.

  269. ACG*

    4 small horse shoes. To be fair I’m not sure what size horse shoes normally are, they just seem like they wouldn’t fit a full size horse. I inherited my office from someone *not* outdoorsy, so I understand why they were left here, but I have no context at all why they would be in the office to begin with (we’re admins in the medical field).

  271. mimi golightly*

    I found a yellowing tabloid newsper from the day after Barack Obama was elected in 2008 under a sink in a staff room kitchen a few years ago; 22 pages about the election. Such a landmark occasion and that happened to be the only thing in there. Also, I am in ireland, so it wasn’t even our election!

  272. Elsewise*

    For several years, I worked at a Catholic university. I myself am not Catholic, and am openly queer, something that was never an issue. We rearranged our desks one day, and I came in to discover that my new desk had very large crucifix in the drawer. I asked my desk neighbor, and he didn’t have one. I started to worry that this was intentional; no one had said anything about my sexuality so far, but was this a passive-aggressive way of telling me someone had an issue with it? I quietly closed the drawer and said nothing about it.

    A few days later, one of the longest-term employees, a very put-together Catholic woman, stood up and asked the entire office “What happened to Jesus?” This was a few weeks before Easter, so there was some hesitation. Was this a genuine question? She’s read her Bible, she’s been to church, we’re about to have a whole holiday about it, she definitely knows what happened to Jesus! Then she pointed at a spot on the wall where there had been a crucifix hanging before the office was rearranged and repeated “what happened to Jesus?”

    I was so relieved to have both an explanation for the mysterious crucifix and to not have to explain a very basic Biblical story to someone who should know it better than her that I just blurted out “Oh yeah! He’s in my drawer.”

  273. Office Chinchilla*

    I was temping at the desk of a receptionist who had been let go, but it wasn’t until I found THE folder of jpegs on her desktop that they told me why. There were many, but the most memorable was the bouquet of penii, which were photoshopped into different colors to make them more flower-like. That’s when I was told that she had two main hobbies at the office: reading her Bible, and flashing the male employees.

    Different office, we were moving to a different location and cleaning out the old one. Shoved into the back of a file cabinet I found some old blueprints of our building. Then I remembered the bank on the first floor, and proceeded to act extra-nonchalant for the rest of the day.

  274. Miss Kitty*

    I work in IT specifically supporting a Large Customer Database. One of our primary site leads for data entry/upkeep left after very long time. It wasn’t always a great relationship between us; she often complained about the way we did things, or why things were they way they were, or the system lacks XYZ feature. She wasn’t wrong about any of her points, but as is often the case, the way you frame your requests makes a big difference. I worked at her desk part-time for a couple of months until we hired a replacement. While tidying things up in the office to prep it for the new hire, I found a large binder. In this binder was every ticket she had ever submitted to IT, and most of them were covered in notes, with LOTS of punctuation ???!!!, in bright red ink. I recycled her book of grievances.

  275. noncommittally anonymous*

    Tritiated water. Still radioactive.

    I was cleaning out an old freezer from a professor’s lab. He had retired, and there was all kinds of stuff in there, including, at the very bottom, a bottle of frozen tritiated water. It had no (required) label, and was not on the University’s list of radioactive substances. The freezer wasn’t labeled to hold radioactivity. The half life of tritium is 12 years. As close as we can figure, it had about 1/4 of the radioactivity it started with, so the bottle was about 24 years old. This was in about 2000, so the bottle was probably there since the 70s.

    Trying to figure out how to dispose of a radioactive substance that has no paper trail showing that we ever had it was …. difficult. (We asked the retired faculty member. He had no memory of ever owning any tritium.)

  276. solipsistnation*

    A friend and coworker died in the 90s when we both worked at a regional ISP (when regional ISPs were a thing…). I was asked to clean out his desk, where I found a bunch of floppy disks. Each floppy contained about a dozen lightly pornographic images. They were all just naked ladies– pretty much the most wholesome porn you could find, like Playboy magazine levels of pretty and naked, and nothing problematic (except for downloading porn at work, I suppose, but this was the days of dialup so it would have been significantly faster at work and nobody had any idea). It was kind of heartwarming, really.

  277. Khai of the Fortress of the Winds*

    I managed a college bookstore that was in an outdated 1960s building that had a center atrium with the floors on each opposite side staggered half a flight different from the flight right next to it. Stairs everywhere. My store was on three different levels with a loading dock with a hydraulic lift that would lift deliveries to our sales floor level. The hydraulics froze whenever the temps got below freezing so the lift was pretty unusable. The office level was a half level up and in the office was a very old floor safe. Probably Victorian. No one knew where it came from or how it got there, unless someone wrestled the thing up a half flight of stairs from the loading dock. The thing weighed about 600 pounds and was locked shut. Of course no one knew the combination. During my tenure there the building was torn down. No one wanted the safe so it ended up going down with the building. I still wish I knew what was in there.

  278. Nonanon*

    When one of my colleagues left the lab we were working in, we were cleaning out his bench… and found ALL the extra thin sharpies that had gone missing over the years (upwards of 20).

    …okay it’s no rat carcass or unlabeled explosives, but if you’ve worked in a lab where you need to constantly write on small surfaces… you’ll know.

  279. Annony*

    Not an office, but a few years ago the lab I was working in was moving to a different floor. As a part of the move, we were sorting through everything in the walk in freezer. Tucked way in the back was a small wood crate about one cubic foot in size labeled simply “explosive”. We opened it and saw several unlabeled jars filled with liquid. We had to call research safety to dispose of it since no one had any idea what is was or how long it had been there.

  280. OhGodTheSmell*

    I don’t know if this counts because it wasn’t a new office, but…

    We have a shared kitchen at work, with two big fridges, one for ‘company food’ and one for people to put their lunches etc in. The cabinets contain normal kitchen things like plates/glasses but there’s also supplies (biscuits, tea, coffee, ketchup..). After an increasingly bad smell someone found a packet of RAW CHICKEN in the cupboard… the presumed series of events was:
    – someone bought it at lunch, intended to take it home but for some unknown reason got distracted and left it on the counter
    – person two, potentially a cleaner but we’ll never know, decided the correct place to put it away was the back of a cupboard. Bleurgh.

  281. Brain the Brian*

    Ants. In a locked drawer of food.

    A longtime coworker had some kind of a mental breakdown and was suddenly gone. When management cleaned out her desk, they discovered the source of the office ant infestation (see above) and had to call an exterminator. Everyone sitting near her had to throw away any / all food we had in our desks, and we worked from home for a about a week to let the exterminator’s work take hold before we reintroduced food into the office.

    The ants are gone, but now we have a cockroach problem. I love it here. /s

  282. Cordelia Comments*

    Got hired at my company in 2021 while most of the staff were still laid off. One of my first jobs was cleaning out offices that had been abandoned when everyone went home for the first lockdown. I ended up with a 4-foot tall stack of calendars, all left open to March 2020.

    1. lin*

      I feel like “things left behind in March 2020” is a whole ‘nother layer of “stuff found in offices”. When we went back in late 2022, I found a sympathy card on my desk for a coworker whose husband had passed away the Thursday before the lockdowns started. That was just sad, really, by the time the card surfaced she’d been a widow for over two years.

  283. Goldenrod*

    Oooh I love this topic! These were found in a filing cabinet but:
    1) PANTS.
    2) A typewritten letter from a department chair advising the professor who liked to smoke but shared an office to “kindly remember to open the window.” (Yes, this was from the seventies!)

  284. Tired HR*

    On my first day at my previous job, I opened the desk drawer to find a very, very large collection of fingernail clippings as well as at least 5 pairs of nail clippers of varying sizes. These were drawers that could not be removed. No one had a vacuum cleaner (we contracted out cleaning at night), so I ended up having to use almost an entire roll of duct tape to “stick” the clippings and dispose of them. Gagging the whole time.

  285. Rara Avis*

    Not weird, but a challenge. In 2001 I took over from a retiring teacher who left me EVERYTHING. Including 12-15 computers from the 80’s that ran a practice program on floppy disks. I tried to keep them running for a little while, but they really needed to go. In Florida in 2003 it was almost impossible to find a way to dispose of them. The school wouldn’t help because they were things she had collected on her one. Couldn’t put them in the trash. No one wanted them as a donation, to recycle, etc. I finally ended up finding a place that would take them — hours of phone calls, and a 2-hour drive. Made me understand why people dump things illegally — if it’s that hard to do the right thing.

  286. RedditBot gone rogue*

    Not me, but my grandmother. She was Dean of Woman Students at Purdue University in the 1940’s. When she joined, she was given a desk which had been used by one of her predecessors and as we have all done at some point, also tasked with emptying it. While emptying the desk, she started reading the paperwork and realised that it was all from Amelia Earhart’s time at the school. Apparently she boxed it up and then had to convince the library that it might be worth holding on to the papers for historical value.

    1. Bruce*

      That is so cool! My grandfather was a naval aviator back then, he had a life long interest in her disappearance and left a notebook with clippings and notes to my uncle who is also a retired naval aviator…

  287. Serious Silly Putty*

    A friend was a school counselor. While pregnant, her bottom file cabinet was filled with snacks, because she was always hungry!
    Her water broke VERY early and she was suddenly on bed rest, and in the back of her head was the realization that somebody was going to discover her embarrassingly huge candy stash.
    Many months (and one premature but healthy daughter later) she goes back to school and does a debrief with her substitute:
    “Don’t worry, I’ve been refilling the snack stash you have for the kids.”

    Her pride was saved!

  288. learnedthehardway*

    I joined a major audit / accounting firm, and found a VERY LARGE bottle of Tums in my desk drawer. I was a little concerned that this was a comment on the culture of the organization, but found that they were actually just fine to work for. I really enjoyed the role.

    The bottle of antacids came in very handy, though, because I found out shortly afterwards that I was pregnant. My first pregnancy had featured non-stop nausea and vomiting all through, and I was NOT looking forward to a repeat of the experience. I was also freaked out because I had just started the role.

    On the day I had to present my strategy to my internal client groups, I was feeling like there was a good chance I would vomit during the meeting. I was pretty desperate, so took a Tums to see if it would help. IT DID!! And it was just calcium carbonate, so perfectly safe to use – 20 minutes of blessedly nausea-free relief. I got through the meeting (thankfully only had to present for 15 minutes of it), and was able to work just fine through my pregnancy. Based on the success with Tums, my doctor was able to prescribe a longer term antacid that made my pregnancy tolerable.

    So, thank you to whoever left that bottle of Tums in my desk!!

    1. AsstPlantProf*

      Hah, I have a huge bottle of tums in my desk right now (late pregnancy, the heartburn is killer).

  289. yeah, really…more nail “clippings”*

    I mentioned upthread that I too had found nail clippings in drawers multiple times, but I forgot to mention the worst nail clipping experience.

    In my last year of grad school, I finally got the opportunity to have an office, shared with my grad school bestie. Our new office was located in a separate part of the building from where most of our faculty were located, near the administrative staff for our program, in a cluster of offices used by grad students from our program. It took a few days before either me or my bestie had time to visit our new office, and I happened to have time to drop by first.

    When I opened the door to the office, I saw little white flecks everywhere, in a semicircle that ranged from the sides of the rolling chair, crossing the back half of the desk. I stepped into the small office (it was basically just big enough for a single desk), I realized that the previous occupant had chewed their nails and spit out the chewed off nail, presumably as they’d stressed over their thesis, like some sort of nail clipping sprinkler. The drawers and chair were also littered with nail chunks.

    Luckily the lovely admin who worked near by arranged for the cleaning staff to have access to the normally locked office. I felt so bad that they had to clean it up but also relieved that I didn’t!

  290. Aggretsuko*

    So this woman had been working half time managing a photo office, and then my office took it over. Once she found out I was temporarily going to run it, she quit the next day….leaving all of her boudoir photography business materials, some photos of herself, and the ID/business card she tried running through the ID card machine, breaking it. We laughed and laughed. Especially since the one day I spent with her, the machine had been acting up all day and she didn’t even bother to take it out…

  291. Nah*

    Our old GM was also a state rep. When he retired and I became GM, I got his office and the desk. Not really weird, but in the deep drawer I found unopened neckties(that my husband now wears,) a beautiful big blue blown glass “Wind Energy award” (which was so pretty I turned it around so you don’t see the award and put it on top of the desk), campaign materials out the wazoo and four bottles of old wine, which I enjoyed very much. I called him and told him about all these things before I “stole” or trashed them.

  292. captain5xa*

    In the early 90s, I was hired to take the place of a man who had worked as the only employee for 30 years in a small, specific department with a government agency that was known for spending money needlessly. Let’s say the agency department provided corrective shoes for retired war horses.

    My first day in the work room made me want to run for the hills. My predecessor NEVER threw anything away. I could barely walk around the work benches. It was difficult to access and use the large (and possibly dangerous) power tools. NOTHING was organized.

    So I girded up my loins and procured six trash bins from maintenance. These trash bins were the size of large refrigerators – 4-foot high x 4-foot wide x 10-foot long. I filled all six up the first morning. It took me two weeks and I went through a total of 52 bins; maintenance was both crying and amazed.

    At one point, my new boss came in to see how I was settling in. He watched me wrestle five unused “new” horseshoes out of a cabinet and toss them over my shoulder into my current trash bin. “You can’t throw away perfectly good shoes!” he hollered.

    I stopped and turned around. “Boss,” I said. “I was born in 1961. These shoes were made in 1959. The company that made them went out of business while I was in high school. These shoes are of an extremely large size that is rarely needed. In my 10 years of working on war horses, I’ve only ever had one other horse with this shoe size. We have newer and more modern shoes that work more effectively, are lighter, are better for the war horses, and easier to use than these. If the idiot in procurement hadn’t thought that bulk-buying six $30 shoes for $25 each was saving money, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

    My boss paused, thought about it and said, “Carry on.”

    1. Tiny Office Ninja*

      Nothing too crazy but once I found a power drill in my new desk (investment firm) and another time I cleaned out an executive’s desk in advance of an office move and found a dinner plate in a file folder – complete with caked on food.

  293. I wasn't expecting that*

    At one job I was asked to index all the photos on the share drive. I was using some google-based software that no longer exists to find all the photos throughout the network. It flashed each photo that it found on the screen as it loaded…including the birth photos from an ex-employee’s wife that he had saved on company network. Some of the photos were, um, direct angles of the birth.

  296. MM*

    OldBoss had finally worked out her notice period, but she had been demoted from an office to a cubicle during this time. As her former employee I was given the task of cleaning out her space, which was a hoarder’s delight. Paper everywhere – emails, printouts from websites, floor plans of space long since redesigned, etc. But the best thing I found was a folder of memos and minutes from meetings where her performance was addressed by department leadership, her responses to their comments, and their final offer (they’ll buy out her remaining contract period or let her work through it but move to a cubicle and lose her employee). The most eye opening part of it all discussed her attempts to throw me under the bus and blame me for things that had gone wrong, and the faculty/leadership response that basically told her they knew she was a liar, they had proof of it, and my performance clearly showed how I was trying to fix the problems she created. Sadly I never saw her again so I couldn’t give her a piece of my mind, but I’ve told many people since that when they leave a job, they need to make sure they take all their embarrassing crap with them.

  297. Roscoe da Cat*

    Not really an office story, but my college was renovating its old chem building (they had built a new one) into a classroom building. They let us clean it out which we did by throwing things out the open windows – chairs, tables, bunsen burners…

    Until someone got into an old cabinet and was stopped by a chem professor who ‘just wanted to glance at that bottle’s label…”

    They evacuated us from the building and the local bomb squad had to be called in for all the old, completely unstable chemicals we were about to toss out a second floor window.

  298. AsstPlantProf*

    Loose butterfly wings. It is a biology department, so not as surprising as it could be, but still unexpected in my desk.

  299. Anne of Green Gables*

    When cleaning out a work room, we found the Social Security card of a current employee’s now-adult son. Apparently he had worked there briefly as a teenager? It was a fairly unusual last name, which is the only way I was able to figure out who it belonged to and return it to its owner.

  300. Oxford Common Sense*

    Well. I hesitate to post this because it is so gross, but…
    I had an employee who left, and it took a while to replace him. When I had a new hire coming in, I decided to thoroughly clean his office, including all the desk drawers. I discovered that the previous employee had made a habit of clipping his finger nails and saving them in a drawer. He had worked there for ten years… there were a lot of clippings in the drawer.

  301. Lou's Girl*

    Renovating an old bank branch we found smoke bombs/ tear gas canisters in the attic. They weren’t live but had never detonated. Apparently, that bank branch had been robbed sometime in the 70s, maybe early 80s, I believe. We heard that the robbers had taken the employees hostage and there was a stand-off between the robbers and the police. The police fired tear gas canisters into the branch, and everyone ended up running out. They captured the robbers without incident, thankfully, no one was injured.

  302. Daisyrae*

    Manager was being let go. I was brought in as the “assistant”. She was finally termed. (Took 6 plus months) when I had to go thru her office I would disparaging emails about me to a variety of people. Second, found out she was having an affair. Her lover left several graphic and lengthy voicemails on her work phone line. So much ick. Worst was running into her and her hubby about a year later around town. Then her daughters who made a few nasty comments directed towards me. Kept my mouth shut but was tempted to fill them all in on mommy’s affair.

  303. Crop Tiger*

    When cleaning out the cabinets in an old science lab in a very small rural Nebraskan town we found a three foot preserved shark-as in preserved with formaldehyde, wrapped in newspapers and shoved in the back of a bottom cabinet. As you can imagine, very little exciting happens in small rural towns. We were in 8th grade. This made our YEAR!

    1. Crop Tiger*

      Also while inventorying the collection of a historical society in a different state we found a box with round glass globes filled with some sort of liquid. Some research turned up that they were supposedly primitive fire extinguishers. Throw them at the fire, and now you have something that is on fire with bonus broken glass.

      1. ICodeForFood*

        If you throw them at the fire, they suck all the oxygen out of the room, so you wind up with no fire… but the lack of oxygen tends to kill the person who threw them! (Many years ago I looked at a house that still had the glass vessels and their holders in the boiler room…)

  304. d.a.r.e.*

    After some office shuffling at my partner’s job someone found cocaine in the desk of a director. He still worked at the company, just didn’t clean out his desk enough when he moved offices. HR said they couldn’t fire him because they “could not prove the substance was his”.

  305. jef*

    Back 20ish years ago I worked in the office of a construction company. One of our job managers walked off the job. He’d been using a small job trailer that we’d rented. The job was winding down anyway, so the guys boxed up the office crap and returned the trailer. The box of stuff landed on my desk and I was tasked with going through it. Most of it was super boring – invoices that hadn’t been turned in to me. Blank time sheets. Scratch pads of notes and calculations. Pens, rubber bands.
    And there was this small cardboard box that I assumed was a matchbox at first glance. But no. It was a condom in a cardboard sleeve. Of course I shared that tidbit with the office manager but didn’t realize that our estimator was walking by and overheard us talking. Apparently that particular job manager was sleeping with the woman who staffed the ticket booth in the parking garage the job trailer was set up in.
    My interest in going through the rest of the contents of the box plummeted after that find as I didn’t want to find out what else he may have stashed for his rendezvous.

  306. Mx. PA*

    I inherited a predecessor’s desk (I’m a Personal Assistant) and after about a year at the job found all of their notes on their boss. Who was also my boss.

    They were not a very nice boss.

    The affirmation that I wasn’t the problem was exceedingly gratifying.

  307. Slippers*

    Slippers. For unknown reasons, I did not throw them away, which was useful a few months later when I got terrible blisters on my feet and couldn’t walk in the shoes I’d brought. I continued to use them on occasion, which is probably really disgusting.

    I eventually figured out whose they were, and years later, when I ran into that person at a conference, the first thing I blurted out to them was, “Oh yes, I know who are! I wear your slippers sometimes.”

  308. StressedButOkay*

    Oh man, this is more in the “bad” than “weird”. At an old job, there was an jr. accounting (JRA) position that seemed to have a new person in there every year or so. One time, the newest JRA was getting settled and mentioned that all the desk drawers and filing cabinets in their office were locked. They couldn’t find the key, the other accounting folks couldn’t find the key, the office manager…NO ONE could find the key. And it was clear that there were things inside everything that was locked.

    Finally, with a growing crowd in the hallway, someone managed to at least get a desk drawer opened by basically a sort-of-crowbar. And I thought the CFO was going to scream because just that one drawer was stuffed to the brim with checks (we were a nonprofit soooo).

    Every single locked drawer, cabinet, hell even some boxes, were just stuffed with checks the last person (or multiple???) who were overworked or didn’t know or didn’t care…

    It was so. so. SO much money.

    1. Rogelio de la Vega*

      Kind of similar situation… I had a job in recruiting for a very large multi-national company (household brand name). One of my colleagues was let go, and I took over her open positions. I had to look through her desk to find information about her jobs, and I found dozens of candidate reimbursement forms. This was back in the early 2000’s when we brought in candidates from all over the country. We had a candidate travel department that booked flights and hotels, but we had candidates turn in reimbursements for meals and mileage after their interview. Apparently none of them got processed in the year that this person worked for us. Some of these candidates were owed upwards of $5-700. That’s a lot of money to be owed for interviewing with us! I spent much of the next 2 weeks processing reimbursements and sending checks and apology notes to these candidates.

  309. Contracts Killer*

    From a metal desk – a drawer full of cigarette ashes. The desk came from storage, apparently from a time when you could smoke in your office. The same office had plastic toilet seats with divots and sharp edges from where people would try to smoke in secret and the ash would burn the seats. So uncomfortable to have to sit on. I was there for three years and they never changed out the seats. Gotta love state government.

  310. Mama Llama*

    We recently re-carpeted the entire office. We needed to put things in the build-in storage shelves in various rooms. First we found a cheetah spotted stuffed cat in a curled up sleeping position with its eyes closed. Then we found one cabinet had a half dozen throw pillows in various colors and textures. Two of them were covered in individual tiny fabric tabs.

    I wish I could attach pictures because descriptions just don’t do them justice.

  311. Pam Adams*

    In my previous career as a McDonald’s manager, I moved to a store that had several YEARS of excess Happy Meal toys in the storeroom. The idea of adjusting delivered numbers had never occurred to them.

    Let’s just say that my $1 Happy Meal nights were very popular.

  312. Rogelio de la Vega*

    Are you ready for this?!! Several years ago, I was the HR manager for a company that had branches across the country. I got word that at one of our branches, the branch manager’s wife was calling to harass employees asking where her husband was and accusing him of having an affair with his female operations supervisor. This was apparently going on for several weeks (the wife’s calls), so someone finally called me to make a complaint. I went there to investigate, and the branch manager denied it saying they were close and both going through marital troubles, but nothing was going on between the 2 of them. We also asked her, and she vehemently denied the entire thing. Like adamant and was horrified. After the investigation, we decided to terminate him. Even though we couldn’t confirm it, he still shouldn’t be taking her out for extended lunches and not shutting down rampant office gossip.

    Fast forward a few months, we got a new branch manager and he called me to ask if I’m at my computer. He scanned and emailed me dozens and dozens of love letters from the operations supervisor (who remember, vehemently denied everything) to the former branch manager. They were tucked in a false drawer in a filing cabinet. Readers, they were graphic with illustrations and poems. It was a treasure trove. We went back to her and asked about it, and at first she tried to deny it again, but in the end she caved. We let her go too.

    1. The OG Sleepless*

      We found two loaded handguns in my MILs’ things after she died. I knew she had them somewhere. I just didn’t know where, and I really didn’t expect them to be loaded.

      1. inksmith*

        A friend of mine’s mum put a gun (don’t ask why she had one, since we live in the UK and it definitely wasn’t legal!) away “for safe keeping”. No longer remembers where.

        So one day, he’ll be clearing out her house after her death and surprise – illegal hand gun.

        1. I Have RBF*

          We never did find the deceased former owner’s handgun when we cleaned his things out of our house (he sold to us as he was dying.) He also had a property in another state, so we assumed it was there.

  314. shapronator*

    I had a strange situation where my predecessor had left in the middle of the work day and never came back. When I started, her cubicle had not been cleaned out and that was my first task. (It was one of my first post-college jobs and I didn’t realize how off it was to have me do that at the time). There was the usual office supply detritus, but when I opened a cabinet high on the cubicle wall, dozens of various-sized pinecones came cascading out. There was one as large as my head as well as assorted smaller sizes. They poured all over my desk and me and made a huge racket. I asked my manager at the time what to with all the pinecones and he was surprised that I didn’t want to keep them.

  315. Education Mike*

    I worked for a company that had started out as a legitimate company, been bought by an owner who was running a Ponzi scheme, and when he was caught it was shuttered, sold, and reopened under the original name. It wasn’t exactly a hellmouth, but you could see the hellmouth from there. The name of the Ponzi scheme owner was never to be uttered. Even a mention in passing would cause a visible recoil from anyone within earshot, especially leadership (who were clueless and caused us all headaches). It was Ponzi Scheme Who Must Not Be Named.

    Anyway, my small team and I were tasked during a slow time to help with a deep decluttering of a conference room/working space. Pulling out lots of old phone directories, stashed electronics, broken computer peripherals, etc. Way in the back of one cupboard, we found a small stack of folders with the name of Ponzi Corp on them. We all gathered around and muffled our guffaws into our shirt sleeves. Trusted colleagues were called over in a “get a load of this” way. After a good laugh, and after contemplating leaving them outside the COO’s office door the way a cat might leave a mouse or making them a prize in the office holiday White Elephant exchange, our manager smuggled them outside and threw them directly in the dumpster.

  316. NMitford*

    I had a fund raising job where I took over, as an experienced professional, for someone who’d started as an admin assistant and eventually moved up to become director of annual giving. Apparently, when she’d started her climb up the corporate ladder, she’d been told to look at other non-profits’ fund raising appeals to get an idea of what worked, what didn’t, and generally how to write direct mail copy. So, got herself on as many mailing lists as she could and saved every fund raising appeal that she got. There were six four-drawer lateral file cabinets of a decade’s worth of direct mail, all neatly catalogued and organized. I threw it all out and gave five of the file cabinets to other departments.

  317. NMitford*

    Also, lest I forget, I found men’s underwear in a drawer at another job. Thank heavens it was new and still in the package.

  318. SoCal Kate*

    I found an (expired) credit card and a copy of some sort of official paperwork. It was a marriage license or visa approval or something like that. Bafflingly, I contacted the coworker who’d left and she insisted she hadn’t left any items. She had also spent her last day cleaning out her desk. I have no idea what she was thinking. I shredded both items.

  319. Kelly*

    The former occupant of my desk had a green file folder labeled, “Equipment Manuals.” Inside that folder was a single manila folder labeled, “Equipment Manuals – Swingline 390NX Heavy Duty Stapler.” And the booklet for the stapler was inside. The amount of work they put into a manual that no one would ever need makes me think they had a specialized degree in busy work.

  321. TANSTAAFL*

    Back in the early 70’s I was a teenager working parttime a few days a week after school. A friend told me about a PT opening that would be on days I didn’t work, and it was in an office in the jewelry district in NYC.

    The first day the owner/sole employee showed me my desk and said that he didn’t have anything specific for me to do at the moment, so maybe I could clean out my desk. Also he said NOT to answer the phone under any circumstance.

    As I started cleaning out the desk I found dozens of time cards from temp agencies for one or two days at most for each person. So I was the latest in a long line of short-term PT secretaries it seemed. On my 2nd day I was still throwing out old time cards and he told me to leave when his wife called and said she was coming up to the office. On my 3rd day he asked me to step into his office and literally chased me around his desk several times before I managed to bolt the room, grabbed my purse and got out of there before I was assaulted. I called him the next day and met him at the bank to get my pay for the 3 days worked. I was a lucky 16 year old!

  322. Former Manager*

    I recently spent about a week cleaning out a storage cabinet that my predecessor used. This person was well known for saving everything and being extremely frugal.

    The highlights: 6 unopened rolls of ticker tape, 16 unopened boxes of colored file folders, a set of disposable warming pans, candy from Easter 2016 based on the expiration dates, a typewriter (electric), an overhead projector, and 3 boxes of unused 5.25” floppy disks.

  323. EvilQueenRegina*

    Not me but a former coworker: A key to who knew what cabinet, with “Key to my Heart” written on the fob. Never did get to the bottom of that.

  324. E.C.*

    When I moved into the old cube of a departing coworker — a known chocoholic — I discovered the dedicated drawer where she had kept her stash. It was readily apparent — not because she had left any packaged chocolate behind, but because, in the process of storing the chocolate there, an encrusted layer of chocolate had somehow built up on all the inner surfaces of the drawer.

    Fortunately, it had been the cheap stuff with a sort of sugary, chalky texture rather than more expensive melty chocolate, so it wasn’t actually disgusting, just really difficult to clean off. Years later, though, I still have no real idea how that even happened. Given all the accumulation, though, she must have gone through a lot of chocolate!

  325. ReallyBadPerson*

    In a desk I inherited from another department, I found medical records detailing the aftermath of a SA, including bills from the therapist who treated the person. It was my first job out of college, and I didn’t know what to do with them. I figured the woman would not want others to know, so I threw them in the trash. To this day, I don’t know why anyone would store such records at work (there were no other medical records in there). I can only guess that she didn’t want anyone in her home to know what had happened to her, or that the SA was perpetrated by someone she lived with. The whole thing was a sad mystery.

  326. Bruce*

    Decades ago I used a polonium radiation source for some experiments to see how it affected a chip I was working with. These are metal disks with a window where a spot of glass is visible that has polonium embedded in it, they are pretty safe to handle since the radioactive material is sealed in the glass, is not penetrating, and has low intensity. When we were done I returned it to the vendor… years later I was cleaning out an old tool box in the lab of my current employer, and found another polonium source! Someone had stashed it there and forgotten it before moving on to a new job. I wound up calling the Safety office, they came over and collected it and figured out where it should be sent to…

    1. Bruce*

      To be clear this is nothing like the stories of cobalt-60 sources wandering loose, I’ve never been near an industrial grade source like that and I prefer to keep it that way!

  327. Mary (in PA)*

    I inherited a desk, and a couple of filing cabinets, absolutely crammed full of papers. And other miscellaneous items. One of which is a license plate.

    When I asked one of my co-workers about it, she said, “Oh yeah, that must be from the van that caught on fire.”

  328. Joseph*

    An apple in a cup.

    The employee had only been gone a day but we found that on their desk behind a lot of paper and other hoarded nonsense. The entire apple had been there so long that the inside of it had turned to dust, trying to pick it up was like something from a scifi movie.

    Oh and they also had a locked drawer that contained every pair of scissors that the office had but we knew about that as they refused to let their staff have a pair of scissors on their desks and instead if you wanted to use a pair, you had to ask for the drawer to be unlocked.

  329. Jane Victoria*

    Had to clean out the office of a terminated employee, who left everything, including an entire filing cabinet drawer filled with soy sauce packets. Did she not like soy sauce, but felt unable to politely decline them when included with her takeout and didn’t know what to do with them? Did she like it so much she was worried about a shortage and wanted to make sure she had it on hand? How long did it take to amass such a collection? I’ll never know, but it’s definitely on the list of things I’ll always wonder about.

  330. The Desk Cleaner*

    I started in a new job and two weeks later there was a big shake up in management, including executive assistants leaving. I was tasked with cleaning out the desks. I found an entire set of steak knives, butter knives – I guess knives were hard to come by in the office? – the bad thing was that they weren’t cleaned.

    I also found birth control pills, so many keys, lots of candy and like 15 fleece blankets stuffed in a drawer. The blankets were still in plastic wrapping, so I took a few home and used them for years.

  331. Plants OP*

    I have a cute one because I really loved this coworker. When I worked at a children’s museum, our most beloved coworker died of old age – she was a volunteer when the museum was founded, eventually was hired full time, and occasionally planned to retire but never followed through. She’d been there over 40 years and kept everything – newsletters, meeting minutes, annual reports, collateral from capital campaigns, event photos, crafts, musical instruments, thank you notes from field trips, literally everything related to the museum and not just her specific role. Over the years facilities had to give her more cubicles to store everything. She even had a few potted trees in one of the cubes. Anyway, when she eventually passed, many attempts were made to clear out her space but it always just become a bittersweet trip down memory lane. We loved finding photos of her leading programs – including photos that were older than many of the staff – most of which we collected into an album as a gift for her daughter. We dutifully kept the trees alive. I wish I had taken it on as an archival project; maybe someone has done that since I left or maybe her cubicles are still entirely intact.

  332. ElliottRook*

    Even the opening stories here beat out my tiny stuffed cow by a country mile, but I could at least provide a picture if anyone was curious haha

  333. The Desk Cleaner*

    One spring leadership tasked everyone in the department with cleaning out their desk. We had been in the building about 10 years, so it was time. They told us to put old technology along one wall and then put our trash in the big bin they supplied. One bin – notice the lack of the s there.

    There were about 100 of us in the department. Leadership underestimated just how much can be shoved into a cubical. I think we filled a dumpster by the end of the day and there was still more coming out. There were multiple bins around the office for a week, being emptied on the regular. The shredding company came to pick up a few times that week. There were probably 100 old computers in a pile while someone worked through wiping them.

    I’m sure there were some new IT policies that came from this one exercise – including tech tracking!

  334. Elizabeth West*

    I’m very bummed that I have nothing weird to add to this list, but I’ve been very much enjoying some of the weird stuff people have found!

    But the fingernails….dear baby Jesus on a merry-go-round, WHY????????

  335. Emogene Cabot*

    My company took over an office space that looked like people had been raptured. Sweaters were on the backs of chairs, coffee mugs still full of Joe, lunchboxes in the fridge, you name it. There was a tiny desk with a typewriter (this was 2017) on it, and in the drawer of the desk was a stack of report cards from 1962-1974ish. A post-it note on top of the stack read, simply, “memories.” Notably, the company had only moved to a building around the corner.

  336. HigherEdEscapee*

    This one is from my husband.

    The nastiest thing I ever found in a desk was a (presumably) very old, mummified human turd. This was in a desk that had been sort of abandoned in a common computer lab in which I was the administrator. I have no idea what motivated someone to poop, then pick up the poop and put it in this desk. I also have no idea how or why someone did something like this in an otherwise normal office environment.

  337. PropJoe*

    When I worked at a teapot factory, a teapot logistics coordinator was fired. When his boss cleaned the fired employee’s desk out the next day, boss found a backpack full of porn magazines, and not the ones that pretend to have a veneer of artistic legitimacy, but the ones you had to buy from the sketchy looking adult video store next to the truck stop in the declining industrial part of town.

  338. pagooey*

    I participated in a service project day where my corporate office went to clean up and beautify a local community center. My team was assigned to the gymnasium, and three of us specifically to the equipment closet. Behind racks and tubs of sports equipment–dozens of basketballs, plastic roller-hockey sticks, jump ropes, nets, all the logical stuff–we found 5 gallon-size cans of nacho cheese sauce, the kind that you’d see come out of a pump at the ballpark. They were 1 week from expiration.

  339. Anna*

    When I was cleaning out my new work station from the previous employee – I found hundreds of fingernail clippings under the paperclips.

  340. OiWiththePoodlesAlready*

    Years ago the team I worked in took out several days to sort through and clean up an old storage space. Amongst the more unusual things found was a cardboard cut out of a shirtless man, and an old book entitled “A Manager and ‘His’ Team”.

    Our female manager got a photo with the book before we biffed it…or she may have held onto it for lols.

  341. I'd like to teach the world to sing*

    A colleague used to work in the chemical storeroom of a university.

    They had a safe that hadn’t been open in years, possibly decades.

    They finally got a locksmith out to open it and inside was… a kilo of medical-grade cocaine.

    (Before anyone asks, he never told me what happened to it).

    2. Cedrus Libani*

      That makes sense, actually. You need secure storage for your controlled substances. I once had to work with GHB (roofies) and that had to be kept under lock and key also.

  342. Tempestinateacup*

    I had two harrowing desk experiences.
    1) When I worked in publishing and my old boss quit, I discovered that he stuck bills he didn’t want to deal with in the gap between the back of his desk and the wall. I only found this out when I tried to place an order with a supplier and they wouldn’t serve us because we owed them in excess of $10K. I had to get new copies of all outstanding bills (a lot were faded and unreadable) and place an emergency call to our accounting department to explain what happened. It seriously messed up our books for months.
    2) I had a coworker who unfortunately had a binge eating problem. I only mention as this later led to her having to leave work on medical leave because her health had taken such a bad turn. When I had to clean out her desk after she’d left, I found a bunch of hidden food, including half a stick of butter with teeth marks in it.

  343. JLF*

    What a timely question! We just told this story at our our Halloween pot luck a few short hours ago.

    When our former Ex Dir left, staff found the printing plate from his wedding invitations in his office desk. We thought it was very sweet and considered mailing it back to him and his wife (they’re still married, you see). But, under that we found an inappropriate for work adult content DVD. Needless to say, all went in the trash…

  344. Jess*

    I once worked with a woman who, aside from being incompetent and mean, was also full of weird quirks. One was her love of Starbucks. Every morning she would bring in a venti coffee from Starbucks, with one of those green plastic splash sticks to plug the lid during the long journey from across the street. (I think they’ve since replaced them with stickers.)

    However, she could not actually FINISH a venti in a day. So the break room fridge was full of half-drunk venti cups with her name on them, and every day at lunch she would come into the break room and conduct arcane alchemical experiments where she’d mix parts of several ventis together with fresh milk and heat it all up in the microwave. It was bizarre and fascinating.

    When she FINALLY got fired for, I assume, gross incompetence, the office manager cleaned out her desk to find an ENTIRE DRAWER full of splash sticks. Why did she keep them? Why did she buy so much coffee she couldn’t drink? Mysteries for the ages.

  345. Geriatric Rocker*

    I found a “laptop” (more like an electronic brick) with Windows 3.1 installed on it. We were way past W95 at that stage. I booted it up and it ran like a charm. I’d forgotten how fast 3.1 was compared to later iterations.
    I made the mistake of telling our IT guy about it and he confiscated it.

  346. Lily C*

    Long before my time, my law firm used a type of dictation machine that had reusable magnetic belts. Cassettes hadn’t been invented yet. Office manager couldn’t understand how they kept running through so many. Turns out one of the secretaries was keeping them all, instead of erasing and reusing, and tucking them neatly away between her never-opened curtains and the window. Discovered after she left and someone pulled back the curtains to an avalanche of sun-baked bands. The story was passed down secretary to secretary as a caution not to hoard supplies, but of course hasn’t stopped several generations of staff from keeping boxes upon boxes of empty binders, old floppies, the “good” pens, broken dictation machines that did take cassettes, twenty five one-pound bags of rubberbands, and endless drifts of paperclips and outdated letterhead.

  347. All the shoes*

    Moved into a new office and found 3 shoes behind a filing cabinet. Not 2, not 4, just 3. I always wondered where the 4th was!

  348. HappySnoopy*

    First day in new job arrive at my desk. The office was actually moving into a new building, so our quarters were in temporary trailers. While people had been situated in these trailers, no one had sat at my desk before. It was a cubicle near the break room for the “building“.

    I’m sorting through office supplies and opening drawers to get situated. I open up the top desk drawer to find…a hard boiled egg.

    It was in a package bought from a convenience store, but still….who leaves something like that around? Twenty feet away from two refrigerators.

  349. Samwise*

    A very large Rick Flair action figure in a file cabinet . Lived on my desk til someone purloined it. Ah well, they must have needed it more than I did.

  350. lin*

    Dear reader, I am the guilty party. A month or so ago I went past an office I used to work in, and found a pair of old tennis shoes in the chair hole under the desk, exactly where I had forgotten them on my last day.

    In 2013.

    1. The OG Sleepless*

      Huh. Had nobody sat in that desk since 2013? Anyway, I can’t talk. I have left shoes under my desk before, though not for 11 years.

      1. lin*

        No, it was a hot-desking situation (sorta) where people would trade out every 30-60 days. Probably every single one of them thought “must’ve been left by the last person, they’ll come by and claim them, not my problem”.

  352. J7*

    As a teacher I am very used to mummified (if you are lucky) sandwiches and fruit turning up when you move rooms or tidy up . This was especially true when we had a somewhat banana pants cleaner who tended to either throw things out the window (pencil cases, books etc) or tuck them into book boxes (food).

    When moving into one classroom I found 28 partly used 2 litre bottles of blue paint.

    The weirdest new classroom discovery though was the pregnancy test… used… it seemed they weren’t pregnant.

  353. Yasmin Kara-Hanani*

    #3 reminds me of my senior year of college when my suitemates were throwing a Halloween party I knew I wouldn’t be up to. I told people I’d be going as Carmen Sandiego every time the subject of the party came up and on the night of the party my suitemates agreed to reply with something like, “I heard she’s heading to an island nation whose nickname is the Emerald Isle” or “I’d look for her in a landlocked country in Eastern Africa” every time someone asked where I was.

  354. Dark Macadamia*

    First classroom: one of the file cabinet drawers contained a skillet, a rolling pin, and a salt shaker (half full).

    Current classroom: all the supplies are in food tins. I have Trader Joes peppermint bark boxes full of staples, sharpies, and binder clips, and some kind of caramel treat tin full of wet erase pens (the kind you’d use for old school overhead projectors… I have no idea why someone had so many).

    The best thing is a talking GI Joe doll from 1999, still in the box, still talking! It’s related to a topic in my curriculum so not completely random, but I have no idea what the previous teacher(s) did with it.

  355. Jules*

    Not mine, but my partner’s.

    He had started a new job in tech support, shortly after one of the C-suite had passed away. He helped one of the colleagues to clear out the desk, in addition to then wiping the pc and other tech. The late employee had, for whatever reason, two company phones in a desk drawer. One was an old Nokia, which was partly charged still despite the number having been disconnected, the other was a slightly aged smartphone, which had lots of NSFW material on it.

  356. Gigi Lucero*

    Nail clippings. A bowlful. Next to a bowlful of pennies. The prior resident of this office had been a music professor and I will never not have the ick from this.

  357. feline overlord's chief vassal*

    Great question for Halloween! Here, have some brain science….

    When I was working at a neuroscience lab in a creepy old former mental hospital, it was discovered that someone had left a brain in a bucket of formaldehyde in the closet for god knows how long. A human brain. Did I mention, creepy old former mental hospital? Creepy.

    There were cool discoveries too, such as a letter initialed by one of the Beatles (for giving one of the psychiatrists permission to re-print some lyrics in a book).

  358. The OG Sleepless*

    Almost 30 years ago, there was a major scandal in my city involving a strip club that was a front for organized crime. There was a huge racketeering trial over it. My husband had an employee who had vague ties to this bunch; we were a bit scared of this guy and were glad when he left. I am not making this up. Anyway, a few years ago we were cleaning out some old office stuff and found a free guest pass to the famous (and now closed) strip club.

  359. Schmad*

    I once got a new role in my same department division. I had to move desks so I would work outside my supervisor’s office. The drawers it came with were full of used dirty socks.

  360. Dani*

    Cleaning out an office for an incoming employee and found a chicken (?) bone on the floor under a desk. It had clearly been there for a long time.
    One lady quit in such a huff she left a pair of shoes and later called to ask if she had also left her passport.

  361. C*

    I really hope the resulting roundup gives us a grand tally of the comments about fingernails and toenails. I don’t need to reread them all, honestly, they’re mostly all the same, but I do want a final count.

    1. Rincewind*

      same! I don’t want Alison to have to read them all either but a count of them would be nice.

      I had to clean out resident rooms in a nursing home due to a bedbug scare. That was just more sad than funny. I did find a…umm…poop….wrapped in a napkin, in the top drawer of one gentleman’s bedside table. He was a very nice man, a former pastor, but after that every time I spoke with him, all I could think about was that poop in the drawer.

  362. Don Quixote, man of Tuchanka*

    Ah yes, the Lady Who Didn’t Understand Staplers.

    At a previous job I inherited the desk and filing cabinet of an admin person who’d moved to another company. Inside the drawers were numerous stapled-together documents that I assume were either some kind of modern art or the product of a weirdly specific form of extreme incompetence.

    * Sheets with the staple dead-centre of the page
    * A twelve page document with eleven staples in it, having been stapled one page at a time fresh off the printer
    * A huge tangled sphere of loose staples. It looked like a chainmail Tribble.
    * She’d somehow driven one right through a foldback clip

    Utterly bizzare.

  363. Anonymous Fortune 100*

    My building took advantage of the pandemic to finally do its long-planned, much-hyped renovations. The 1980s cubicles really had been shaky.

    We were brought in a few at a time to move our things from the old space to the new– and we found the “new” cubicles were all reused from a building that had been closed in another state. The biggest clue? The desks & cabinets weren’t empty.

    Yep…whoever dismantled and shipped the furniture AND the crew who reinstalled it had worked around telephones and paper files from laid-off employees.

  364. Margaret Cavendish*

    My job as a records manager means I periodically lead department-wide cleanup days, and there’s always a contest for best “finds.” Some of my favourites include a set of professional dental tools, a coconut bra, and a life-size cardboard cutout of Austin Powers.

  365. Healthcare is Weird*

    Stepped in as interim manager of a medical office due to an unexpected resignation. The amount of random crap found in that office was crazy! A squishy foam ear of corn behind the desk, rolled posters with the former division chief’s name printed on them (he had left 3 years prior), a laptop bag with expired credit cards belonging to the manager THREE MANAGERS PRIOR to the one who had just left, a box of creepy dolls meant to be instructive for children, rented equipment that was long overdue for return, multiple boxes of expired supplies, patient paperwork going back 10 years stuffed in a cabinet that was so full the lock broke… every day it seemed like I found something new!

  366. Librarian*

    I had to clean out the desk of an employee who had suddenly died, and she had had, shall we say a beef with another employee. To the point I had to bring her into the office and talk about appropriate workplace language a couple of years prior. I thought it was all long and done. Went to her desk with a colleague as witness and a box for personal, box for work. People are looking on sadly. I found a commercial pretend “voodoo” doll, complete with pins, and the antagonists face taped onto it.
    I almost choked between shock and wanting to laugh, the antagonist was in the room. I just showed it quickly to the witness said “not something her family needs to see” and took it to my office buried in the other “work” stuff we cleared from the desk. I can’t even remember what I did with it, but I sure remember finding it, and it was in a top drawer, the kind you might open if you were looking for a pen or a post-it. Makes me think of the letter I would have had to write to Ask A Manager if that had been found while she was still alive, as I am not sure I would have known what to do.

  367. Grey Duck 74*

    A desk drawer full of wrappers. Candy wrappers, old chip bags, breakfast bar wrappers, a few tic tac containers.. practically anything you would see down the snack aisle. But the part that was even weirder than a drawer full of wrappers, was that there were no crumbs in *any* of the bags. Not a spec of cheeto dust to be seen. So, so odd.

    2. Dancing Otter*

      There’s a YouTube tutorial on making a zipper pouch out of a “share size” candy bag (I think M&M). You may have had a narrow escape for the office secret Santa.

  368. Fishy Business*

    My favourite was a former colleague who always loved eating tinned fish at lunch time (usually tinned tuna). He quit and we were cleaning out his old desk drawers for a new hire, only to find all of the drawers were packed with tinned fish, most of it past its “best before” dates.

    No actual work material or anything in there, just tins upon tins of fish. Dude loved his tuna.

  369. Who Lives In a Pineapple Under the Sea...*

    This is rather tame, but we unlocked the office of a former manager who left piles of newspapers on his desk, with images of people on the front page decorated with plucked human facial hair and pen scribbled eye patches and missing teeth.

  370. Zeus*

    I was in a six-month temp job with a few other temps. The one who sat next to me was eventually let go early due to repeated privacy breaches (really, really bad in our line of work) and I was there when the boss was clearing her desk. She pulled out a box of painkillers, then a box of antihistamines, then a bottle of some prescription medication…it was like a clown car of different medicines, they just kept coming. I was pretending not to pay attention, but I did hear the boss whisper “does she have a pharmacy in here?” under her breath. There were at least eight different drugs in there as far as I could tell!

  371. Bubbly*

    I worked in a Community Centre run by the Salvation Army about 7 years ago. We received donations of clothing, non perishable food, toiletries, art supplies, etc; all the time but one day we happened to receive a box full of vintage looking (like from the 70s?) toothbrushes still in their own packaging, and bars of soap in fancy but clearly dated packaging.
    There was debate over whether to donate these items to the public, and their safety implications.
    There was also talk of selling these vintage items over eBay!

  372. earlthesachem*

    Years ago I worked for a company that contracted with hospitals to deliver medical equipment- like IV pumps- in the hospital. Early in my time at this particular hospital we switched the IV pumps from a blocky, beige, durable-but-dated style to something newer, sleeker, and purpler.

    About a year-and-a-half later, one of the old pumps appeared at our office door. Apparently one of the departments (probably Nuclear Med, it always seemed to be Nuke Med’s fault) was cleaning out a seldom-used storage closet and found it, still on it’s pole, stuffed in the back. We had long ago recorded it as lost and written it off. So the hospital got to pay us for it.

  373. G. Lefoux*

    I had just gotten a management position at the museum where I had been floor staff for several years, and had a cubicle for the first time. My predecessor was very neat, and mostly left behind normal things: employee performance reviews, paperclips, a stapler. Oh, and several gold coins. They each had a cube, a cone, and cylinder stamped on them, and were clearly part of some long-past educational initiative, but nobody I talked to had any memory of them.

    Our floor staff had updates and policy reminders printed on the back of their daily schedules, and I occasionally inserted sentences like “the first person to radio G that they’ve read this will receive a prize” into random spots. The prize was usually an extra break, but after awhile I started offering “an extra break or this mysterious gold coin I found in my desk.” A surprising number of people took the coin!

  374. Marita Covarrubias*

    I fired a man for violating our security procedures over and over. When I cleared out his desk, I found a post it note taped to the back of his calculator with all his usernames and passwords on it. The term was clearly a good call.

  375. Stabby Fencer*

    Found a Very Old Banana when switching desks (my team lead got bumped to a nicer desk, and I got his). He mentioned the banana to me, and I think he was trying to normalize that he had just left it there. It was black and small, but not smelly. I think he was trying to see if he could slowly dehydrate it without creating a biohazard.

    Speaking of biohazard, I inherited a desk once where the resident kept spilling his coffee over the front edge, and it would kind of drip down from there, kind of into the drawers. It formed stalactites on the underside of the desktop, and lumps of goo in the drawers and on the drawer fronts. I never understood how he could stand it. (Maybe this is why he switched desks?)

  376. Carole from Accounts*

    OMG, totally I forgot about this happening until I saw your prompt.

    A company I worked for closed in bankruptcy, and I was one of the few people left who cleaned out the office. While emptying the under-desk filing cabinets of former employees, I found a portable bidet. A used. Portable. Bidet.

  377. Anna*

    It seems tame compared to some of the others, but I once opened the drawer after moving desks and found hair trimmings. It looked like the previous occupant had decided she needed an urgent trim and the obvious solution was to trim an inch or so into her drawer. But it was a window seat, so maybe o shouldn’t complain.

  378. HappyMarketer*

    Not at work but my parents once opened the drawer of a desk in a second hand shop and found a pair of false teeth

  379. Alice*

    I replaced a longtime employee who had been let go somewhat suddenly. I gather her performance had been in decline for some time, and then there was An Issue. This is all to say – she had occupied the office for many years, but left very suddenly without much time to clean out her things. When I opened the small drawer in the middle of the desk, it was literally filled with fingernail clippings. Like, maybe hundreds of them? Clearly, she had been clipping her fingernails into her top desk drawer for years and years. I honestly didn’t know what to do. Ultimately, I found some disposable gloves under the sink in our executive bathroom and used them to clean out the drawer. I never told anyone about it because I felt so terrible for her. Clearly she was under a lot of strain.

  380. Ebar*

    It was the office stationary cupboard but I did find a box of print heads for a ‘golfball’ type (ask your mum or dad) printer – something I was familiar with only through school when it was described as obsolete even at that stage.

  381. Rincewind*

    Not “cleaning out” an office exactly, but I used to do janitorial work at a social security office. the public facing kind.
    I once found a pair of socks under a chair in the waiting room. They were clearly dirty socks. Someone removed their shoes and socks in the waiting room, and then put just their shoes back on (I hope!).

    weird.

  382. Liz*

    While working at a non-religious social service non-profit, a coworker was let go for repeatedly proselytizing while on the job. I had to go through his desk and computer. Perhaps unsurprisingly there was a Bible in his desk drawer, but his photos folder on his work computer contained many, many photos of scantily clad women.

  383. Real McCoy*

    I really wish I was making this up, but it did happen… in the back of the cupboard in the men’s bathroom, in a brown paper bag, no idea how long it had been in there… giant purple strap on.

  384. Rachel B*

    Pistachio Shells.
    I moved into a cube in a corner after the previous guy had moved on. He had apparently been snacking on pistachios for *years*, and instead of using the garbage can ALSO UNDER HIS DESK, he just tossed them under his desk and called it good. It was visually obvious, but as soon as I tried to sit down my feet encountered a ~2 foot tall mountain of pistachio shells.

  385. You Can't Fight In The War Room*

    I didn’t personally find this but it still haunts me for the levels of wrongness/weirdness.

    In a previous job my team was moved to a “War Room” to “Collaborate” on a large project, meaning they crammed us all into a small interior, windowless conference room where we had no privacy. On top of this, they decided to take away our assigned cubicles without telling us and sent facilities staff to clean them out over a weekend. Most of us had already taken anything we wanted home, but apparently one of the programmers had dozens of old sandwiches stuffed in his desk drawers in zip lock bags. Because they were in bags, they were not obviously smelly, but they were definitely rotting/molding.

    It turned out that his wife packed him lunch every day, but he preferred to eat with work friends, so he just stashed the sandwiches because he felt guilty about throwing them out and didn’t want to cause drama with his wife by telling her he wasn’t eating them!

    He was mortified that this dysfunction was discovered, but the team, while also a bit grossed out, ended up defending him because we were all so pissed about the “collaborative work space” situation.

  386. Ainsley*

    A pro/cons list in a notebook from the office’s previous tenant about whether she should marry her boyfriend or not. (I asked around and they did get married and are still married, as far as I know.)

  387. Notasecurityguard*

    wasn’t a desk but a car. my first job out of college was as a car salesman. I’d just sold a car and since it was a slow day I figured I’d help out the lot attendants and clean out the big stuff from the trade in. usually it’s just trash but sometimes people leave stuff like IDs or important documents in the glove box, or CDs or the like.

    In this case it was a .38 revolver. I called the guy and he said “oh THAT’S where I left it! can you hold on to it for me?” so for a few days underneath some sales forms in my desk drawer was a revolver and a set of bullets

  388. iglwif*

    Not exactly an office clean-out, but decades ago I was the maternity cover for someone, which meant a significant change in job duties but also shifting literally to the cube and the filing cabinet right next door. She had a fancy ergonomic keyboard (1990s style) and it was FULL OF CRUMBS. In her files I found more than one sent fax (remember, it was the 1990s) that included negative comments about me … sent to people I was now going to have to work with. Fortunately she referred to me by my title, not my name, and fortunately I was good at both my own job and, as it turned out, hers, but the fact that she (a) wrote those things about me, (b) to clients, and (c) left them in her files for me to randomly run across has never ceased to amaze me.

    A decade or so later, same company, same building: part of the business was sold off, the staff associated with it went to the purchaser or retired, and the rest of us spread out to occupy the newly vacated space. First there had to be some renovations, because–among other issues–some of those folks had been occupying that side of the building since the days when it was totally acceptable to smoke cigarettes at your desk. Nothing had been painted in decades, the carpets were at least 20 years old, etc. In the course of the renos, both an old rotary phone and a mummified raccoon corpse were discovered lurking above the ceiling acoustical tiles.

  389. Claudia Jean*

    I found baby teeth in a little case when cleaning out the desk of my new office.
    The office was in a junior high/high school so even though it was a school, it would be odd for a student to still be losing teeth.
    I had an irrational fear that someone would come looking for them and I didn’t want to accidentally throw away something sentimental, so I didn’t toss them right and then forgot about them. I’m pretty sure they were still there when the person after me moved in.

    1. Office Scavenger*

      I almost hope the teeth in the desk were there for the same reason – your predecessor just didn’t want to throw them away. And I almost hope the person who came after you has done the same thing.

  390. Office Scavenger*

    Late to the party, but my boss and his brothers were always re-selling things they found at estate sales, and our team had more space than people, so lots of their finds wound up in the spare offices waiting to be sold. My first year working there, we ran out of binders and I was told to “borrow” one from the estate sale finds. I brought it back to my boss and our office manager, triumphantly opened it up, and our office manager gasped – it was full of topless women. Specifically, it was a valuable and nearly-complete collection of Playboy trading cards, and our office manager wasn’t offended, she was excited. She knew someone who collected them, and connected him to my boss to buy the lot.

  392. merida*

    An entire desk drawer stuffed with returned mail (fundraising letters – it was a nonprofit) from multiple mailings over the course of several years. The former occupant of the desk managed mailings and was supposed to update addresses as undeliverable mail was returned, but never did and just stuck it all in a drawer. Because the mailing list was never updated that meant that over the course of years we were paying postage and printing costs for hundreds of letters to be sent to the same set of bad addresses over and over and over.

    1. merida*

      A couple years ago I helped our office manager clean out an old empty office that was used as storage. It was *all* useless junk, but the ones I remember were:
      1. a 4-inch thick instructional manual for Windows 1995 OS
      2. a large set of CDs that contained my company’s back up files from the early 2000s, despite those same backups now existing in the cloud
      3. a lamp with loose frayed wires in the place a bulb should go (no bulb)

      And yes, there were multiple complaints made when these items were trashed.

  393. Quill*

    I’m very late, but at my first non-internship job out of college, I found a computer filled with men’s genitals.

    My predecessor had apparently gotten a virus on the laptop that I inherited that made all attempts to open the internet automatically direct you to a full search of penises. The settings were in a language I did not read, we did not have IT since it was a four person operation, and I was obviously not going to go to my boss about it, since he was in an important business meeting and I was also 23 and not about to tell him that my computer had a penis problem.

    Instead I uninstalled all the browsers, googled “how to remove a virus by hand” on my brand new smartphone, and was very busy for four hours that I was supposed to be reading training documents and setting up my computer.

  394. Rooster*

    About a year ago, my mother had the extra task of cleaning out the vault in the municipal office of her very tiny rural town, which had been used for storage for decades upon decades. My Family Group Chat had greatly enjoyed seeing interesting or odd snippets of local history she found.
    One day, she came upon an old envelope upon which were scrawled the words ‘Skunk Ears’. “Surely not,” she thought, and in an excess of curiosity peeked in the envelope.
    Friends, the labelling was VERY accurate.

    We suppose it hearkened back to the days of pest bounties, but…why keep them?

  395. Gigi*

    I was the director of a large government office with three units and we were moving into a new building after 45 years in the old one. On our pre-move clean up day, I had a contest with three categories: 1. Most bags of trash (15 was the winner), 2. Oldest found document (1984), and 3. Most disgusting item. The unit that found an old, used bar of soap with hair on it won 3. That narrowly beat out a calcified gym sock I found behind a safe in my office. Shudder. I was so happy to move. There wasn’t enough bleach in the western hemisphere to make that place feel clean to me.

  396. Mari*

    The extra set of books and proof that my recently exited boss had embezzled a lot of money from the company in order to pay for her daughter’s wedding. It was an interesting day because she had recently been fired and there was no replacement yet. So I was there on my own, at my second ever job, wondering what the actual heck I was meant to do now?

  397. Soft clothes for life*

    Male condoms, female condoms, IUDs, diaphragms, cycle beads, penile models, and pelvic models. It was a public health organization that focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights, so not very surprising… but still not what I expected when I was asked to “review and archive the materials” in a filing cabinet at my new job.

  398. Hey Now*

    I went to work as the managing editor of a magazine that was a member benefit of our organization. Think like Smithsonian magazine or something.

    I wasn’t in charge of any people but I worked closely with our graphics department to produce it and our boss’s admin assistant, who helped me with a lot of the daily details. I found out right away that the previous editor had managed by panic, not to mention that she had a terrible temper and everyone seemed kind of afraid of her, so by extension they were a little wary of me and some seemed almost afraid of me at the beginning.

    It took me a long time to get past all of the terrible, inefficient processes that she had established and to build relationships with the people I needed to, because a lot of them were holding on to bad feelings and suspicions.

    One day about three or four years in, I was going through drawers in my cubicle because there were plans to change my desk space and I found a Moleskine type journal that I had never seen in the whole time I had been there. It was shoved in the back behind a bunch of random stuff that the previous editor had obviously been collecting.

    At first I didn’t really understand what I was looking at and then I realized it was a diary of all the transgressions against her. Paranoid and nasty listings of all of the people she worked with or people who had left the organization a while back, just everybody she had come in contact with who she was convinced had done her wrong and fueled her paranoia, with details about each act. It was so hostile.

    She had been meticulous about not leaving any information for the next editor that would help them do the job, even though it sounded like it was her choice to leave, and was convinced that everybody was against her and stupid and incompetent. So it made leaving evidence like that even more baffling to me.

    I wondered as I went through it if she had somehow been hoping that someone would find this journal of “People who are mean to me” and they would see the error of their ways and she’d triumphantly return to the organization as everyone hailed her like the queen she obviously was (at a higher salary and more benefits, of course).

    I guess I just didn’t find it fast enough to help her.

  399. Patty Nielsen*

    We discovered that an employee who was responsible for complying with federal regulations and reporting on our compliance with said regs to a specific federal agency had changed the company’s address to her home address. Therefore, letters they had sent my employer about our failure to comply had gone only to her, and we nearly lost our ability to offer these services to our clients

  400. SlothLover*

    We were cleaning out a cabinet in the break room once, and found a can of soup that was, judging by its expiration date, a teenager. I commented, “This can of soup has more seniority than I do!”

  401. MKC8*

    A cubicle filled with printed out emails. Close to a decade’s worth, both sent and received, in binders and bankers boxes. I got permission to shred them, fortunately. The binders and boxes filled all the shelving, all the space under the desk, and most of the surface of the desk.

    At least one other person had worked there between me and the e-mail hoarder. I don’t know how they were able to work in that space.

    Same cubicle had a drawer with about two inches of pulled-out staples in it.

  402. Dragon_Dreamer*

    Two condoms, 1 opened and 1 not. In a locked office (storage room, really) last used (supposedly) 5 years before. In the University Biology building. They had expired the year before.

    The former occupant was known to be… eccentric. He had retired 5 years before and died shortly after. The room had been locked ever since.

    Now, the hallway lock wasn’t the greatest, but this room opened onto the hallway, AND a frequently used prep room. The prep room lock was decidedly much stronger, but only the office had the key to either door.

  403. Reader, I married him*

    When I moved to a new office, I found old passport photos of a recent ex of mine. He had left that workplace years ago, but apparently the people who took over his desk before me didn’t bother cleaning it. I got a bit annoyed: I was just trying to get this person out of my head!

    It took a few more coincidences for us to resign ourselves to fate. We’ve been together four years now and I still find his stuff all over the place. Our place. :)

  404. Gericht*

    During my PhD I had to work in a room that also contained a set of completely unopened boxes, covered in the dust of years.
    At some point we decided to look up what was in it using the codes on the boxes.

    It turned out to be a completely unused 10 year old electron microscope worth nearly 100K euro’s. I had been ordered for a project, but by the time it arrived the one needing it had moved on, and noone had any idea how to assemble or use it so it was just… left there.
    For all I know it’s still in the boxes now.

  405. Betsy S*

    A full-sized wooden window, glass and all, slightly peeling.

    Gifted to a previous occupant, because it was the only office without a window.
    I was just happy to have an office with a door (with a glass pane) after years of cubicles.

  406. Eraser dust*

    Dozens and dozens of pencils from tourist spots all over the country. It had been the department’s practice for years that anyone who took time off was required by peer pressure to bring back pencils for everyone from their travels. The woman who had my new office apparently didn’t want to actually use the pencils and also didn’t actually turn up for work on a reliable basis. The drawer of unsharpened pencils left my desk and went to the communal supply room.

  407. business pigeon*

    I took over a desk once that was absolutely crammed full of stuff. So full that I didn’t have room in any of the drawers to put my own files in. One entire bottom file drawer was filled with receipts from the past 25+ years. Most of them were for things we didn’t even have anymore! I asked my manager (Anne) whether it would be okay to throw them all out (in case there was some use for them that I didn’t know about), was given the go-ahead, and then proceeded to carry several armfuls to our trash/recycling room. On one of the trips, a manager (but not MY manager) asked me in some alarm what I was doing. When I told her I was throwing out old receipts, she immediately said, ASK ANNE WHAT TO DO WITH THEM! I told her I had already asked, but she said instead of throwing them away I should give them all to Anne just to be on the safe side. I said I knew that Anne was already gone for the day, and had already told me it was fine to throw them out, but she told me to leave them all on Anne’s desk “just in case.” I told her I would, and then promptly went to the trash/recycling room and took great pleasure in dumping them all in the trash cans. That place was bonkers banana pants, but that particular manager was the worst. Her behavior explains, though, I guess, why my desk was so packed with useless old junk to begin with.

  408. This Is Fine*

    I work in a research library and one of my tasks is managing a few dozen reservable carrels (study spaces). The bigger ones, reserved for faculty, came with a full-sized desk. When the faculty carrel wing was repurposed for another use, I had to clear out whatever the occupants left behind. In one carrel that was desk drawers (plural) full of cotton rounds. Like you’d use to remove makeup or apply cleanser. These didn’t have makeup on them but they were not pristine.

    That particular former carrel occupant is still on campus and whenever I see them, there is nothing else I can think about.

  409. Jay*

    All the coworkers involved in this story are (somehow) still employed at my institution, but one day while I was very new to this place I was looking for a stapler in various peoples workspaces and found an open box of 9mm bullets, about 3/4 full. I did not find the stapler.

    A couple days later I worked up the nerve to ask my coworker what the hell that was about. Apparently, it was something of an inside joke- a couple members of the team had been using a nail gun for an install (of what, I am not sure, as we are IT…), and when another coworker came to check in with them he found them gone and several “bullet casings” on the floor (from the nail gun). They called campus safety in a bit of a panic, and the guys doing the install were quite surprised when they got back from break to find an officer looking at their job site with a coworker. One of them had brought the bullets in as a friendly jab at the coworker who called, but it sure didn’t feel friendly when I stumbled onto them without context!

  410. Deadly Nightshades*

    A crack pipe. It was in the top drawer of my new desk, where you would put pens and stuff. The explanation was that it was found in between managers and they left it for me to decide how to dispose of it. I put on gloves, put it in a small trash bag with a couple of other non-paraphernalia trash items, and put it in the dumpster.

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