When Cliff asked if I would maybe help him do inventory of his lockers, I rather foolishly blurted, "leave me the keys, I'll just do it, it'll be easier." I rather foolishly blurted this because Cliff's wine is not in boxes, it's in racks and it's all over the place. Every rack was emptied into boxes, cataloged, and then locked into the few vacant lockers we have left. This took a couple of months, many locks and many keys.
For another month I was trying to work out the perfect plan of attack, but it became evident that the shortest road to it would be to simply lay it all out and clump like with like. Doing this during business hours wasn't going to work, so one weekend this is what The Cave looked like. Every box came out of every locker to be organized. Kind of awesome, isn't it? The answer is yes. Everything was now with its appropriate peers and reslotted with purpose.
Cliff said, "I seem to have a lot of extra space in my lockers." I told him it was because I was so efficient. Truth is, it never stopped nagging me, the extra space, but though I double checked everything and everything matched, I knew: I lost Cliff's wine. I had NO IDEA where that wine was. At some point I put something somewhere and didn't write it down. Now I was toast, sweaty, crispy toast.
And ridiculous toast, because it had to be here somewhere, The Cave is finite. I finally managed to stop panicking long enough to find the locker I have no memory of, opened by a key that was randomly loitering. Beats me.
About a month after this, the other Great Cave Summer Project was scheduled: replacing the evaporator fans in the Bordeaux Room. About a year ago they started getting moody, now there are new ones. FYI, air conditioning people get to work at 6 a.m. Not funny!
While they did their thing, I finished the wine. A day after organizing and racking this batch I thought, Wait, weren't there those four other boxes in that other locker. There was a THIRD set of lost wine. I don't know what's wrong with me, but it's kind of funny if you don't have to spend too much time with it. One of Cliff's lockers is known as The Locker of Lost Souls.
Cliff's lockers are DONE, it only took like five months. And though Cliff was infinitely patient (while remaining legitimately/equally dubious), I must say Cliff's new system is a thing of beauty. He comes in now and we play Stump the Troglodyte, he's trying to catch me on my first error, but other than losing everything and The Locker of Lost Souls that aren't where they belong, it's been SPOT-ON, thank you very much. Everything is mapped, cross-referenced, thorough. I'm very pleased and hope to never do it again.
Lastly, while they were doing their install:
