Throwing My Life Away

This month I’m training my “replacement” and cleaning out 8 years worth of files, and in some instances 20+ years of files. These tasks are long overdue, and my office is assuming that sterile efficient look as the piles of paper disappear and the bulletin boards are either emptied or reduced. My framed New Yorker cover of the shopping carts and the bar codes, from ages long ago will stay here, as will be 2005 calendar, and two plants. The other plants, a Christmas cactus and a second, unknown cactus, I rescued from certain death and now feel obliged to care for. The “other” cactus is truly amazing. All it wanted was some water and real sunlight and a bit of talking to, and it has rewarded me with a performance of growth and bloom that warms my prickly little heart. So of course, some things can’t be thrown away.

I’m still looking at the rattiest of loose leaf notebooks. “Holy Writ” is inked on the spine in my effort-to-be-neat printing. I began the notebook when I began my career in EDP, then MIS, then IS then IT, as a lowly but happy “programmer trainee,” way back in 1980. Twenty-five years in the trenches. The loose leaf contains gems of information of value to a COBOL programmer. Sixteen ways from Sunday to sort files, VSAM status codes, backups, restores, the stuff I could make those big machines do. One has a feeling of power, almost godliness, with the ability to make a big mother of a mainframe computer do one’s bidding. Days long gone. It was always more fun to be hands on, talking to the machine in its language, sometimes on the level of bits.

So it’s gonna be hard to toss this old grungy loose-leaf notebook, but I must. Sigh. Hard to throw away an important piece of your life, but we do it all the time. It can be as simple as a move or when you realize that another generation is standing where you once stood and it doesn’t seem that long ago. The natural order of people, places and things. Yet, hard.

So farewell, 1984 check digit routine. Still useful, but perhaps not to a fiction writer.

So this compendium of now antiquated knowledge must go, a large piece of life no longer lived, and I will suck it up and put it in the trash. Really. But I am going to be mega pissed if in twenty years old techies are selling this stuff on EBAY for big bucks. On the other hand, I saved a pretty cool little green tin that held Carter’s Little Liver Pills from my parent’s store of stuff that got moved 16 times and never tossed. I am going to be the one on EBAY selling a skid load of old computer books, and one little patent medicine tin.

Aloha

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