Someone came over for game night a few months back, scanned my shelf, and said, with the specific tone of someone who thinks they’ve caught you at something, “you alphabetized your board games.” I did. I have a library science degree, an actual professional certification in organizing objects so other people can find them, and apparently that doesn’t turn off just because I’ve walked out the building doors for the day.

The case against it, which I’ve heard more than once, is that alphabetizing by title doesn’t group anything useful together, heavy strategy games sit next to light party games with nothing in common except a coincidence of first letters, Arcs next to 7 Wonders next to Brass Birmingham, which tells you nothing about what kind of night you’re planning. That’s a fair complaint if the shelf’s job is to help me decide what to play. It isn’t. Its job is to help me find a specific thing I already know I want, the same way our library’s fiction section is alphabetized by author rather than grouped by mood, because “something sad” isn’t a findable category but “the Sebald” is.

I do have an actual system for deciding what to play, it’s just not the shelf, it’s a much messier mental map of weight and player count and how recently something’s been out, and honestly that map works better in my head than it would as a second, competing organizational scheme layered onto the first. Two systems fighting for the same shelf space is worse than one clean system plus a working memory, at least for someone who spends her working hours untangling exactly that kind of overlap for other people’s collections.

My coworkers think it’s funny that I bring my actual job home with me this literally. I think it’s funny that anyone expects a librarian’s house to look any different than her workplace does. The shelf works. I can find anything on it in about four seconds. That’s the whole bar I set for it, and it clears that bar every single time, mood-based sorting be damned.

The one place I’ll admit the system strains is when I actually try to use it to plan a night, standing in front of the shelf with people arriving in twenty minutes and no clear sense yet of whether the group wants something light or something that eats the whole evening. Alphabetical order is no help there at all, and for about a year I tried fixing that by adding little colored stickers to the spines, a second coding system layered on top of the first, before admitting to myself that I was just recreating the exact kind of dual-classification mess I spend my actual workday untangling for other collections. I peeled the stickers off eventually. The mental map stayed in my head where it apparently works better anyway, which is its own small lesson about not needing a system for everything just because a system worked well for one thing.

So the shelf stays alphabetical, unapologetically, and the actual decision-making happens somewhere else entirely, in conversation, in a quick poll of who’s tired and who wants a challenge. Two separate systems, doing two separate jobs, and I’ve made my peace with neither one needing to do the other’s work.