I don't consider myself a hoarder. But over the more than three decades we have lived in the same place I have certainly let stuff accumulate around the margins. And so like many during the last few years, I took my home confinement as an opportunity to do a little cleaning.
I started in the back corner of my office where all my old tech gear was stacked, recycling old hardware and setting aside a few cables and accessories that might still be of some use. In what I aspirationally call my "workshop" (an old kitchen cabinet with a chipped countertop between the boiler and the oil tank), I sorted random screws into one can, nails into another. I hung a few shelves in a closet on which to put extra toothpaste and bathroom stuff, got rid of some old tee shirts, and shredded some files lying around since before Reagan was president.
Perhaps the most time-consuming task was taking pictures from multiple years, videos from my first television shows and my dad's old photographic slides, and converting them from physical objects into electronic files. The pics were the easiest: scan or take a picture of a picture, and it is captured for the ages. Before I ditched my old videotape machines I played back and saved the pile of tapes that dated back to my college years. As for my dad's collection of slides of our family, I bought a specialized scanner so, as Paul Simon sang, I could see once again how Kodachrome made the world a sunny day. Unfortunately, included were several snaps of me in bell bottoms and Nehru jackets that might have been better kept in the dark.
Once I was done, my corners were noticeably cleaner, my tabletops clearer, my shelves emptier. However, the digital version of me was another matter. In that world things are stacked to the virtual rafters. And with electronic storage being so cheap and limitless, there is absolutely no incentive to ever clean anything out. Those slides my dad had curated so lovingly were in a number of steel cases, with each slide in an individual slot. Digitizing them reduced the collection to physically nothing. And as a bonus they became more accessible than they ever were in physical form. No more setting up a slide projector and a screen. Now from a phone or computer anywhere at any time I can pull up baby pictures, family vacation shots, and birthday parties from age 2 to 10. All while taking up essentially zero cubic anything.
And that's just pictures. I did the same for my old CDs and audio tapes. All were added to an archive I started years ago where I captured and scanned old project files, old tax records and old address lists. Virtually anything that I had laying around I dumped into electronic storage. Had I kept even a fraction of it, my basement would be overflowing with boxes of stuff. Instead, it's all nestled comfortably on several hard drives that take up less space than my baking supplies.
Of course, there are two important niggling disclaimers to this voluminous historical record. The first is that finding any specific thing in the archive is not so easy. The filing system is more random that thought out, so locating a particular piece of paper or photo is a bit of a crap shoot. And that all presumes that I have a need to look at an address list or calendar from 34 years years ago. Other than the nostalgia factor, it's unlikely to be of any real use to be able to look up with where and with whom I was having lunch on June 2, 1988.
Still, there's no good reason to delete any of it. I'm not tripping over it, it's not gathering dust, and it's not starting to smell or leak. It's just piled high, one digital box on top of another. Look at it this way: in real life I could be mistaken for Marie Kondo, the doyen of organization and tidying up. But in the bits and bytes world I have old copies of National Geographic stacked to the ceiling. So just remember: if you ever come and visit me in my metaverse, watch where you step.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford tries to be tidy. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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