I am no longer the office oinker.

My desk no longer is the pen of the workaday pig.

	Seldom Seem, David Templeton's whimsical perspective on life and times in and around Washington County, appears weekly in Washington Sunday.

It's neat as a museum and clean as a surgeon's hands. This former Oscar Madison is now Felix Unger. I am the Odd Couple incarnate.

That's because my entire work space has been transformed miraculously into a pristine environment where nary a pittance is out of place. I even wipe the barren desktop daily with sanitary wipes.

And if you dare drop something on my desk, I'll bite your wrist like a rabid pit bull.

The reasons for this new-found nattiness and personality transplant from pig to raccoon, collector ant to free-handed grasshopper, slob to dandy, reduces to two words.

Prozac tablets.

Just kidding. Actually the two important words are Patty Kreamer ? a professional organizer from Green Tree who practices what she preaches, which is to purge, purge and purge some more. In a few busy hours of unrelenting purging, she transformed me from the clutter glutton to the desktop bulimic.

What one throws out will never be missed, she espouses. When I threw something away, she thrust a fist to the air in celebration.

Understand what my office desk looked like B.P. ? Before Patty.

In June 2001, I wrote about desktop squalor. My desk resembled a vandalized flea market atop a toxic waste dump after a tornado followed by an earthquake. The only thing lacking, I said, was the pig, until I realized said pig was sitting in my desk chair.

Then I psychoanalyzed myself with help from a June 2001 Women's World magazine article, "What your clutter reveals about you." I thrive in chaos, it said, because I focus on the big picture and ignore details. I work twice as efficiently to complete a task amid self-imposed pandemonium.

Natty neat-niks need order in their lives. They hate surprises. They become stressed because they must work so hard to maintain order, it said. Those with neat desktops but messy drawers should wear diapers. Actually, it said such people maintain neat public appearances to hide inner lives full of chaos.

I stridently proclaimed, "Desktop piety leads to desktop anxiety." If neatness is a cruel dictator, I preferred desktop anarchy. Give me free-dump or give me death.

Then I attended Patty's summer seminar at Washington and Jefferson College where she taught neatness. Her method is E-A-S.Y: ELIMINATE what you don't need. ACT upon whatever the paperwork demands. SEND away what can be sent away. Then YOU file whatever remains.

Rather than deal in theory, I opted to see her in action. I invited her to provide advice on a newspaper office that has been ant-like in our bad habit of collecting and stacking whatever might be needed tomorrow or 2019.

Patty walked in with professional curiosity, took a long pause to behold the twisted vistas before exclaiming: "I'm excited."

In a flash, she bobbed and wove, stood back then focused in, did pirouettes with heaping cabinets and pas de deux with cluttered views. She told me to rid doors from a credenza we never use because, well, it has doors. I removed the doors, emptied it of computer parts and converted it into two shelves where I now stack current newspapers.

That freed the top for phone books and dictionaries.

Then I cleaned my woeful drawers.

In all, we loaded nine large wastebaskets full of old files dating to 1979, old government studies, news releases and trash. I dragged each heavy load to a Dumpster that was one-third full when I started but brimming when done.

I was sweating. I shed my sweater that bore hanging chads.

And what I soon realized was, Patty is one neat lady.

With a marketing degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, she landed office jobs only to end up organizing those offices. She said she had a penchant for coming up with the most efficient way to run an office.

In time, this former golf pro decided that professional organizing was her thing. She feared public speaking, but ultimately faced those fears and learned to speak before audiences. She joined the National Association of Professional Organizers where she serves as chairwoman of its marketing committee. She travels nationwide to lecture and aspires to be a leader in her natty industry.

Professional organizers, she said, are as important to one's happy home as a good plumber and electrician.

But her specialty is offices in general, and paperwork in particular, even though she also does some homes. Other professional organizers specialize in homes, relocating senior citizens, downsizing, organizing photographs and dentist offices.

Her first book, "... But I Might Need It Someday! How to organize your life and win the clutter battle once and for all!" details her theory of natural order. She also has a Web site: byebyeclutter.com.

Searching for lost items five minutes each hour translates into 40 lost minutes a day, almost 3 1/2 hours a week and 166 hours a year. That's equivalent to more than four weeks a year. For a business, that's lost money and time. "The reality is that most people waste an average of six weeks per year," she said.

That's 12 percent of the work year spent searching.

Besides cleaning and purging, Patty set up an easy-to-follow system to help me avoid returning to my clutter-junkie ways. She put files in alphabetical order then sent me a computer index. I know what's in the desk without resorting to pawing through files. Filing once meant losing it forever. I no longer fear the file.

For that reason, Patty equates organization with freedom.

"Shopping is a bad thing," she said. "That's what causes this."

She helped organize the kitchen of one elderly woman who bought things daily from Goodwill Industries. She had so much junk she no longer could use her kitchen table and slept on a 2- by 3-foot area of her cluttered bed. It took two people five hours each to clear the kitchen table. When Patty returned later, the table was filled again.

"Some people keep nothing. Some people keep everything," she said.

Ultimately, she views clutter as a psychological menace. "It's nothing more than unmade decisions," she said. We stack things because we cannot decide what to do with them. She's turned it into social philosophy that is spawning a second book, "The Power of Simplicity." It begins with the line "Simplicity is difficult."

Am I a reformed clutter addict?

I doubt it, but I am convinced of her system.

The problem is, my desk is so neat I've developed a facial twitch. My phone rings louder because the buffer zone is gone. I feel rather empty. And, hey, there's nowhere to hide.

I think I need counseling for post-traumatic disorder disorder.