Electronic Packrat

I just spent the afternoon deleting old email messages and I am not even halfway done. Why on earth was I keeping copies of 2006 banquet menus or forecast files for months that have come and gone? I kept a lot of Crystal reports I had created through the years and training materials for software that had been upgraded three years ago. No wonder our IT Manager at work regularly sends out emails, threatening to delete them en masse if we do not go through them and weed out the ones just taking up her precious gigabytes of storage.

Here's the thing, even with the quantity of messgaes that go through my in-box, I am not in the top-ten-offenders list of company space hoggers. Not even close. I do not automatically save sent messages since I programmed Lotus Notes to ask me if I want to save a copy before sending anything. I keep my work life and my personal life separate by using my work email address strictly for work. We have a spam filter which automatically deletes the special offers for "Work-at-Home Moms" and Viagra. I guess it must be due to the fact that I work part-time, and my out-of-office agent is enabled half the time to inform people that I am not in the office. Not that it stops anyone.

Talking about unwanted email messages, please do not send me any of those that I have to send out to five other people in the next five minutes, including the one who sent it to me to prove that I like them. Do not send me the ones that I have to forward in fear that lightning might strike me if I don't. I do not mind the occasional ones that are funny but do not send me any that is vulgar since I will politely ask you to take me off your mass mailing list. Do not assume that we share the same warped sense of humor.

I am not in the habit of keeping things. My husband and I "clean out our closets" and regularly drop things off at the Goodwill donation center. It is different with electronic files. It is because they are stored somewhere in "never-never land" in neat little folders which I can retrieve in a jiffy that I do not think of deleting them. I always think that the minute I get rid of something, I am going to need it. Never mind if it was a reply of my boss agreeing to my vacation request two years ago.