The office/business supply company Uline has discovered that I have started a business, and thus I have started to receive giant catalogs from them. Yesterday Leonard and I started looking at those catalogs; perhaps you saw my tweet about crinkle paper:

the https://t.co/iJpdxCpQQX catalog reminds me: some possessions, work are "attractive void fill" pic.twitter.com/hgCfUxq9oR

— Sumana Harihareswara (@brainwane) March 6, 2016

As I kept reading, I was struck by how this catalog systematically lists the unnoticed objects that surround me in every office, workplace, shop, hotel, restaurant, and school. Certainly I had marveled, as a child, going into the Office Depot with my dad and seeing the boxes of badge holders, the desks and chairs, the day-to-day accoutrements of bureaucracy. But the Uline catalog goes further. Uline sells desiccant packets and takeout boxes and those gridded walls to hang merchandise from and bollards and red velvet ropes and PLEASE WAIT HERE signs and mats for cashiers to stand on and benches and wheeled utility carts and feminine hygiene dispensers.

I feel a curious awakening, as though given X-ray glasses for one of the systems that make the world go. I knew you could get these sorts of things on Amazon, sure, but I had not yet been confronted with a curated list. I don't have any plans, right now, to open a storefront or run a warehouse, but this list of products helps me see how I could. I would buy these things, and they would organize and streamline my operations, and my customers and my workers would react accordingly. I could put up a STOP sign, and people would stop. I could place a clothes rack near the entry to an event, and people would leave their coats there. I could put my team in white coveralls, and they would distinguish their colleagues from outsiders. The Uline catalog promises ways to make your world safer, cleaner, calmer.

But, reflexively, I also see this catalog as a set of heists, scams, and cons waiting to happen. You can buy and customize tamper-evident shrink bands for the caps of bottles -- and thus hide evidence of your own tampering! What better way to get a saliva sample from a smoker than by installing your own smoker's receptacle someplace you know they'll be? Reserve more handicapped-accessible parking spaces wherever you want by buying and installing "reserved parking" signs!

I am an entrepreneur and a manager who dreams about building things and works to build some subset of those things. And I am a suspicious security thinker who imagines ways to break and steal things, and blows off steam by talking about movie plot threats with her spouse, who transmutes a fraction of those conversations into science fiction. And on some level I am void fill, as are we all.