real world columns: junk

I have a lot of stuff in boxes. I also have some stuff out of boxes as well. All the boxes with stuff in are in the box room along with a few old computers one of which has the first version of this article on its hard disk, so I shall have to start again. Fortunately I have an ancient laptop as well as the two ancient computers in the box room and what better subject to write about than all those boxes.

Part of being human and living this Western civilized life is the accumulation of things. American families often store excess junk in large lock-up units, if they default on the rent then the contents are auctioned off. Punters view the contents through the open door without actually entering and bid on what they can see. Strange stories abound like the one lot that contained only three boxes. One of the bidders thought he could make out a couple of rifles in the far corner which could mean the boxes contained the uncollected spoils of a robbery. He bid and won the lot and as he walked in his feet started slipping and sliding; the floor was strewn with mothballs. Only when the cases were opened did it all fall into place. The crime wasn’t robbery but murder and the mothballs were to mask the smell of the three bodies in the cases.

Well I certainly haven’t got any bodies anywhere (although I haven’t seen the cat since we moved) and I don’t have any mothballs or rifles. So what do I have then? Well I try (rather unsuccessfully) to follow the old adage about only having things in your house that you know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. However this seems to ignore things that will probably be useful in the future, and things that are easier to store than to have collected or trashed. Another important omission is things that have a sentimental value. I have a rivet from the Eiffel Tower somewhere, it is caked in rust and certainly not beautiful. Furthermore its usefulness as a rivet is pretty limited, the reason probably for its being removed from the Eiffel tower in the first place. However I am not about to part with it, I think it’s great.

Occasionally I find parallels between all this real junk and the virtual junk on my computer. My hard disk is full of directories called: old-project, old-old-project, project-mar-97, misc., sort, check, trash and so on. This is just about manageable if I am dealing with written projects with small text files, but it runs into problems if I have to deal with multiple copies of video and sound files. Indeed whereas text files take a lot of work to create them (don’t laugh it’s true!) huge megabyte amounts of video and sound can be recorded just at the touch of a button. Sometimes I need to tidy it up.

The question is, can we look at the situation in the real world and see if any of the solutions translate to the digital world? One real world problem is the putting away problem, not taking the trouble to archive stuff because it will probably be useful in the near future; this leads to clutter build up on your (physical) desk top and in your office. My solution is big tidying binges (usually as an excuse for not getting on with writing) where everything on my desk top usually ends up getting stuffed in a big file labeled ‘desk top March 2000’. This works in the digital world as well.

There are two other solutions which do not involve actual tiding up but instead render the junk more comprehensible on some level. One is piling things up; you associate stuff and gather it into chunks, these are conceptually easy to deal with. So instead of a sea of documents you have just eight piles with easy conceptual labels. The other solution requires even less work; you familiarize yourself with the junk. If I spend two hours sorting through a cupboard sometimes I can end up throwing hardly anything out and yet by having considering everything, the contents no longer feel like anonymous junk but a known collection which is less daunting.

Conceptually speaking physical tidying up always seems easier than digital tidying up. It is easy to adopt a one-pass process when you are dealing with a simple spatial model; first upstairs then downstairs, first this room then that room and so on. Even the checking is easy; have I done this room already? Take a look! The visual difference between a tidy room and a not yet tidy room is huge. Although most computers now offer visual / spatial ways of dealing with files the process of stepping through a collection of nested directories with long-forgotten names is far more difficult.

The ultimate solution in the real world is just to move to a bigger house. This translates very easily to the digital world, simply do as I did, buy a new laptop and stash the old computers in the box room… but remember to copy any documents that you are in the middle of writing.