As part of my usual process, I minimized most of what the person was using, because I dgaf what users are actually doing on their computers. I'm only interested in getting the "problem" that they're complaining about, solved, so I can go home.
When I finished minimizing everything, I shit you not, this person had two full screens of icons on their desktop. I couldn't help but blurt out "that's a lot of icons" they went on to describe how they use their desktop as a dumping ground and they clear the whole thing every few months.
Since I couldn't give a single shit about what they do with their computer, I said something to the effect of "alright", fixed the unrelated "problem" they had and moved on.
I do the same thing, but mostly because I develop Doom mods for fun and it's just an easy place to dump sprites and audio files. I can drag a file directly from my desktop to the modding program I use, and then just clean up once I'm finished working on what I'm working on. Otherwise my desktop just has a few shortcuts.
I do this. It's the "heap system". After a couple of months it gets full and I create a folder called "crap" and move everything inside it. After this, the process repeats itself and often leads to folder trees like C:\Users\dh\Desktop\crap\crap2\more crap\crap\important crap\crap.
This usually continues for the life of my computer and then, one day, it just gets wiped because buggered if I know what's in the crap folder..