The Drawer Has Been Granted General Jurisdiction
The junk drawer did not expand its authority. The household stopped contesting it.
Summary
An incident has occurred in which a household drawer, originally designated for temporary storage of miscellaneous items, has achieved the status of permanent infrastructure.
The drawer was not officially designated. No designation was made. The drawer became the junk drawer through a process of repeated use and collective refusal to address this fact.
Timeline
The drawer first received a miscellaneous item on an unrecorded date. The item was described at the time as temporary. The description was accurate. The item remained.
A second item arrived. Then several more. The drawer was not reorganized because each individual item seemed too small to justify reorganization. Reorganization, in aggregate, was indefinitely deferred.
At some point the drawer acquired a daily function. Scissors. Batteries. The envelope that might be important. The key to something nobody could name.
People began saying: the scissors are in the junk drawer, as though this were simply where scissors lived.
Contributing Factors
Under the governing rule, once a junk drawer acquires a daily workaround, the workaround becomes the official storage system.
The drawer is recognized as temporary by everyone who uses it. This recognition does not change its function. It does not slow its accumulation. It simply means that at any household meeting, the junk drawer can be described as a temporary situation by the same people who have been using it daily for thirty-one months.
Current Status
A small portion of the kitchen was recently reorganized. The junk drawer was not part of the reorganization. The drawer's position was described, during the reorganization, as "fine for now."