Stickers

There’s something about those little stickers that come on apples, peaches, plums, pears and oranges that I just can’t resist. For years, the frame on the bulletin board of every office in which I’ve worked has been covered with them and to my knowledge no one has ever removed them once I’ve left – my own version of “Kilroy was here”.

At one company where I worked for over nine years, I covered most of a doorframe in my office with the stickers. It was definitely a conversation piece. The only rival I’ve ever had in that regard was a colleague at the same company who had a couple dozen pencils that she threw like darts into the acoustic ceiling tile of her office. We were a creative bunch. I’m sure maintenance took a dim view of both of us, but no one ever said anything.

The more stickers I stuck, the better I seemed to feel. Well, that’s kind of an exaggeration – they don’t dictate my frame of mind and I don’t think about them all the time or anything (I’m not that over the edge yet) but there is a certain satisfaction in adding to their number and seeing them accumulate.

I’m fussy about my stickers too. Not just any sticker makes the cut. Price stickers don’t count, and the stickers you find on bananas are too big. I have been known to include a couple of those on my bulletin boards and door frames, but I always feel like I’m “cheating” when I do.

If I’m at home with no place to stick them (they don’t go on my door frames), I stick them on my palm, on a fingernail or roll them up into a little tube. I play with them until the sticky stuff on them is gone. Every now and then a stray sticker will show up on the top of the tape dispenser in the kitchen or on the side of the file cabinet in my den. Sometimes I’ll just put them on a piece of paper, which I can then discard. But I can’t seem to just toss out my little sticker friends straight from the fruit.

Nothing like putting a personal idiosyncrasy out there for the world to see but I suppose my sticker fascination is better than being a closet zit picker. Still, after what I’ve just committed to paper, who am I to judge another’s quirkiness?