New Old

Sudden changes of fortune have me ramping up into a new job function. The work will involve a lot of engineering software crunching away, and thus require a lot of hard disk space. I've been going through the space I filled up during my last job so I could archive what I need and delete the rest and make room. It suddenly hit me that as I identify a folder full of files I won't ever need, I'm deleting the only tangible results of hundreds of hours of work. In fact, I don't need to archive anything. I could erase my hard drive and life would go on without any change. All those hours, all those files created, all that work was for nothing more than the salary and benefits provided as the time passed. There's no legacy and thus no real accomplishment.

That I even notice this probably explains why I have a house full of stuff I can't seem to decide can be gotten rid of. Maybe I should erase the hard drive after all, and then go home and light a bonfire. I mean, what am I archiving? The barest remnants of four years of semi-creative technical work: schematics and presentations I'm loth to discard, against some distant day when I'll need to refresh my memory of what I'd done. We know that day will never come. I'll burn this crap to a CD, throw it in with some other CDs, and some years down the road trash the whole lot. I guess I'm conscious that I put something of myself into each of these projects and am therefore reluctant to part with it.

Last night we stopped for gas and I pulled out my little notebook to write down the odometer reading and the gallons purchased.

"I don't know why I do this," I said. I was self-conscious because I wasn't alone. "I'll never actually use this information." After some brief chat on what it's theoretically for and how the information held by the data never much changes anyway, she said the one thing that could make sense of it.

"Maybe it's a way to stay connected to your dad."

Somewhere in storage I still have tiny notebooks with mileage numbers annotated by my father and by his father, collections of numbers that should never have been saved. But they were, because my father was a scientist and his an accountant, and they led data-driven lives, and wanted indicators of gas mileage. Maybe because its decrease potentially indicates car trouble, or because they wanted to track usage of resources in general, who knows. No one can ever know. For me it's a habit I started with my first car, a habit that has not been broken. I still oddly regret throwing away my first car's gas purchase notebook.

Well, this momentary reflection was helpful. I'll continue deleting files, even while I remember the thought and care that went into each one's creation.