The catch-all box

Fourteen inches by fourteen by twelve, in the corrugated cardboard every moving checklist recommends and every supply aisle sells in stacks of ten, the box labeled MISC in black marker holds, by committee estimate, somewhere between six and eleven distinct categories of object that its owner could not be bothered to separate at two in the morning before a move. We have opened four of them for the record, with permission, under supervision, and found: a single winter glove, three remote controls for televisions no longer owned, a cable of undetermined purpose coiled and taped to itself, an unsigned birthday card, and in one case, memorably, a second and smaller box also labeled MISC, nested inside the first like a warning. The marker used for the label is nearly always a permanent one, applied in haste, the letters large enough to be legible across a dim unit and final enough to discourage further sorting. Committee opinion on the box's proper handling is not unanimous. One member holds that MISC is an honest label, the last true confession a mover makes before sealing a box and walking away, and that no further honesty should be demanded of it. Others maintain that MISC is where good intentions go to be taped shut, a category built entirely from the refusal to choose one, and that a box confident enough to admit it contains everything and nothing deserves, at minimum, an inventory before it is stacked and forgotten for a decade. The vote was three to two. The box was not opened again.

The Committee on Ordinary Objects