White-Collar Hoarding

Matt Paxton likes to refer to himself as an "extreme cleaning specialist." Over the years, the president of Clutter Cleaner—a Richmond (Va.) business that's often featured on the A&E reality show —has witnessed a lot of bizarre behavior. He's cleaned homes littered with, among other things, dead cats and human excrement. Yet one Rochester (N.Y.) house sticks out most. It belonged to a retired office assistant from Eastman Kodak—and it was filled with office supplies.

This feverish collector of workplace ephemera had compiled dozens of Eastman Kodak staplers and staple removers, countless reams of carbon paper, and hundreds of typewriter erasers. They were all "stacked in her filing cabinet, like it was a storage shelf from the office," recalls Paxton. He estimates that unopened boxes had been gathering dust in her home for at least 20 years. "They had about as much value as a jar of Confederate money," he says. Although the woman never told Paxton why she'd held onto these office supplies—or why she'd taken them in the first place—Paxton believes this case study is a severe example of an ordinary phenomenon. "There's at least one hoarder in every family," he says, "and there's one in every office."