So I spent the better part of today converting two shoulder bags, two large storage boxes, a medium storage box, and a small storage box of documents into two kitchen garbage bags, two contractor garbage bags, and four neat(ish) piles of archival documents.
Fun was had by all.
Interestingly, some of the personal files went back as far as 1990. Those could not hit the shredder fast enough. All in all going through the stuff from the 90's was fun. Like a little travelogue of my life through that period. Phone calls to Boston and Brockport, expenses in Brunswick, Maine and Madison, New Jersey - random checks to random people, all interesting stuff. I found my acceptance letter to grad school, the letter I wrote my college prof for tenure in the position I have now, the ID badge from my 10 year high school reunion; it was a little treasure hunt.
If I may, I will share with you a dimension of the futility of the whole thing.
Apparently, at the end of the summer of 1994 - I would have been at summer stock in Maine - at the end of the summer I took all the bills I had accumulated while away from my apartment and put them in a folder labeled "misc. to be filed."
That folder then went back to New Haven with me, and sat. Eventually it moved with me to Chicago to my folks house, then to the apartment in Evanston. After a brief stay there it moved with me to the guest room at Bonnie & Tracy's house in Las Vegas, and then to my apartment at The Lakes. A little bit later it moved with me again from Vegas to my Shadyside apartment in Pittsburgh, and then to the Squirrel Hill apartment. Finally, last July it moved again, with me, to the house. The original contents of the file, undisturbed completed that whole journey, still with the original label "misc. to be filed."
That trip, over a period of 12 years, spanned more than 5180 miles.
Tonight, the contents of the folder, still unchanged and unfiled, went right into the shredder.
Part of me wonders if it wouldn't have been easier to have circular filed them back in Maine.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
More Document Madness
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
i often feel like my life is ruled by little bits of paper and backs of envelopes with notes to myself, phoen numbers, and other miscellany written on them in a hurry - always in a hurry.
the beauty to me of drowning in paper, and honestly of data in general, is that if you put it away for long enough, it usually becomes useless and you can throw it out.
R.
I certainly threw away enough random scraps of paper.
I found a bar napkin on which I had written an excuse note for my shop crew when I was at CMU.
Lots of fun stuff.
Post a Comment