Triumph for the Pack Rat

I keep stuff. More stuff than I need, but less than some of those poor souls who do not remember what color the carpet is under all the stuff (and can't tell from the pathway, because it has turned grey with wear).

I have about 4 boxes of papers in various places in my house (mostly in my garage) from different times in my life that I refuse to part with. During my last move, we moved them, and I promised I would look through them and toss what I could and file what I needed to keep. Well, it's coming up on my second lease renewal and I just haven't had a chance to get through all of them. I did get through part of one of them *yay* about a year and a half ago, and I occasionally go out to the garage and dip into one of the boxes, bringing out a treasure of incomparable worth, that sits on my dining room table for a while, then moves to my desk, where it collects dust in the open, instead of in its box.

I also keep things at work. I hoard my letters, with all their precious attachments, on the off chance I might need them again. This has worked for me in the past; I have found emails or letters that helped me resolve an issue. But at my office, I have one little drawer and one hanging file corral on my desk for all my files. We share a tall 4 drawer for all our customers' invoices, and that's it. I have had a pile, wrapped lovingly with rubberbands up in my cabinet for over a year now. I just put some of it with the 4 boxes of stuff I pulled out of our 4 drawer and shipped off to outside storage. But if I ever need it back, it is in a box, safe and sound. Just like I like it.

My files and emails are about in the same state of pack-rattedness as the rest of my desk. I don't ever delete emails, but I'm sure I should be, but I might need it three years down the line. You never know. And I store all my attachments, named with helpful names, on my personal network drive (which has not reached as gigantic proportions as you might imagine; it's still fairly reasonable). And every month, squish all the files down into a nice, helpfully named zip file. Which go back to, you guessed it, when I started at this company.

Well, today was exciting for this pack rat. I had an invoice for a 2003 charge that I could show we paid in our system, but the 2003 files are in storage (and I have never even requested one, isn't that amazing!). So I decided to go through my old email attachments and lo, there was my beautiful proof, including all the bells and whistles attached, laying quietly in the dusty old zip file. I was so excited I showed my co-worker, a wonderful woman with a daughter my age and a good sense of humor, and she laughed. She never keeps anything past its useful life: email, paperwork, paper clips... But she appreciated my triumph, and agreed that yes, today was a good day to be a pack rat.

Now, if I could just find my keys and my cell phone I could get on with my weekend.