Office Move: Other People's Trash

I'm almost done prepping an office space for a move next week. I'm being moved into a space that measures six feet wide and ten feet long, with a window on one end and a door in the corner of the other. I have no budget, so I've been scrounging through the campus warehouses to find furniture. I have no time, so I'm making this fit in during Christmas Break. I'm unhappy with the move and the location, I'm reluctant to be in constant conflict with my boss, and I'm just generally feeling disrespected right now. I don't even have a chair for my desk.

I came in to find three filing boxes FULL of materials that my boss no longer wants to house in his filing system, but he expects me to keep. I went through the boxes today, and the majority of the materials fit into one of these categories:

1. Samples of products from K-12 institutions (which are nothing like Universities...)
2.  Out of date or rescinded documents and reference materials (seriously- like, pre-9/11 stuff)
3. His hand-written notes, many of which relate to insurance (which I don't do) or hold his personal opinions and thoughts (awkwaaaard!)

There was only a tiny percentage of material that was relevant, current, and not full of personal remarks.  In addition, there was an entire box of books with titles like, "The Bullying Child" and "Security Risks for the 20th Century."  Again, not relevant to my work! I was baffled.  My space is less than half of his space. These materials are overwhelmingly personal and/or irrelevant to my job. Why would he think it was appropriate to dump this stuff on me?

My first instinct was to recycle anything I felt was not useful, both to address the complete lack of space in my office, and to support our initiatives to "be green" at work.  As part of the move, I had expected a handful of files to sort through, scan, and archive...and maybe a planning document or two to keep on the shelves. I hadn't expected to receive piles of his discarded personal property. I felt pretty comfortable recycling the out of date materials with no notes, but many of the documents were copies of work he did in a previous career- and while they don't apply to our current role or institution, they're probably still important to him.  I certainly don't feel empowered to recycle material with his personal notations.  I felt trapped...

...and angry! I'm not his secretary, or his maid, or his assistant. I am his employee, but I was hired to do a job, and nowhere in that job does it include cleaning up his mess. I may be sitting in the storage room of the suite, but I am not his storage facility.

So, went through the materials and I anything that fell into the categories above went back into the boxes. I then stacked them, neatly and out of the way, in his giant office.   I then set up a few drawers in the main room of the suite for general office filing.

My rational is this:

I went through the materials as instructed. I saved anything I thought could be helpful that wasn't also covered in his personal handwriting. Everything else still belongs to Joe. It is not appropriate for me to dispose of the items, and he needs to decide what to do with the material.  If he feels the material is important enough to retain in a department archive but not in his personal files, he can maintain them in the general filing.  If the material is really so vital that I need to maintain it, I find it reasonable to ask for a clean, unmarked copy. I deserve respect as a professional, a colleague, and an employee- my space is important and valid for my own materials, and I am capable of maintaining my own reference files.

We'll see how this conversation goes on Monday. In the meantime, I'm going to put some lotion on these papercuts and get back to work.