ARGH: categorical categorizing for categorization

Its a tongue twister and mind screw all at the same time.

I sometimes wake up dreading my internship. I really love what I do, but I know that by the end of the day (a day where lunch is really early, making the afternoon interminable), I will be a pile of mush. After a nice nap and a shower, I'm ready to explain why.

Take a box full of...stuff. This stuff could be anything. Literally. Now place everything in the box into a specific category. Not so specific that it'll be on its own, but not so vague as to be difficult to find later. Easy enough? Freaking no.

Our software allows for a finite number of categories and subcategories, and given the terms of the grant, each individual item must be accessioned and categorized.

Say you have about 20 large categories with each of them averaging 3 subcategories. While some items you come across are so weird that they can only go one place, and some are so common that they're easy to deal with, the majority of the material could fit into at least 2-3 larger categories and any number of subs. If the same person were doing the project by themselves, no worries. But there are about 15 people, each with a different idea of what category is best for what item.

So today I had a mind-numbing (I'd say blowing but once I tell you what the items were, it'd seem like such a bad joke) conversation about where a number of postcards fit. There is a correspondence postcard category. There is also a printed material postcard category, and an exhibition postcard category. Faced with a group of postcards written by one man to AW, I thought it was an easy correspondence postcard fit. Yes? No.

Why? Because the postcards each contained business information. Business information in this case meant that the author wrote a number of postcards stating that he was a 22 year-old virgin and wanted to be part of an orgy scene that AW was known for filming. According to my boss, this was a business proposition.... But it only had one sentence and the man didn't seem to want reimbursing beyond the sensational loss of his virginity.

Anyhow. That was just one. The box had hundreds and hundreds of things in it, mostly letters. To be able to see where they fit, you have to read every one. Sometimes I feel like a peeping tom cause I'm reading someone's mail. There was one that also went into the business pile where a man wrote that he needed to be filmed soon cause his body was starting to sag.... Its amazing what people will send on a postcard!

I also am wondering why dirty magazines offer no table of contents to the articles. I thought there was a huge part of the population who only read them for the intellectual content. Thats what I was doing! I did, however, get to learn what a Spanish Fly Swindle was, so I guess my two hours of looking at people doing it wasn't completely for naught....

Anyhow, it was an interesting day. My brain is mush and really all I can see when I close my eyes is pictures of naked people...