I have a bit of a problem. Well, it's not so much a problem for me as it is for my husband. And Blogger. And Gmail. And any other application that stores digital files.
I am a digital hoarder. I save all my files, drafts, emails, and copies of each and every photo whether they are good, bad, important, or completely useless.
Case in point:
I have 7479 emails in my Gmail inbox. Seriously. My Gmail is the digital equivalent of those apartments that people fill to the ceiling with trash and then can't find their way out of and end up having to call 911 so search and rescue can send someone in to save the hoarder from the trash maze avalanche that they can't seem to escape from. That doesn't include the 125 in my Spam folder that gets emptied every 3 days. I have 233 email drafts. So, to all of you who wonder why I never email you back just know that I probably wrote the email and left it sitting in my draft box until it was irrelevant as an email and I felt foolish not sending it but guilty for deleting it and so I decided to keep it in email draft purgatory. True story.
You may wonder why this is a problem. Well, mostly for me it isn't. I don't mind having those emails in my inbox. I don't think it's a big deal to save those drafts. But, apparently, my desktop (and my husband) think this digital hoarding is something I should seek help for.
The "Start Up Disk Full" window is nearly burned into my screen from being there so often. And my husband, saint that he is, faithfully cleans my desktop/hard drive each and every time I whine about not being able to do what I need to on my computer. And then he begs me (and I mean begs and begs and begs me) to please stop saving every single PDF, jpeg and other letter combos of files that reside on my desktop.
In fact, while on vacation Thomas managed to remove 5 Gigs of unnecessary crap off my computer. I'm not a technical person, but he says 5 Gigs is a lot. I'll take his word for it.
I guess I need to get serious about mending my hoarding ways before I end up calling rescue workers to pull out from an avalanche of my mediocre blog drafts and emails I've had since 2001...
Where do you fall on the digital pack rat scale? Do you delete when you're done or save things "just in case?"
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
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5 comments:
I can sooo relate. And so can my very techy, very patient husband.
J -
I actually left an e-mail address + created a new one because I had/have 7,600 unopened e-mails.
You hold the record though, because there were only 4,722 when I abandoned ship.
But delete it? Are you crazy?! What if there's something important in there?
As always, your writing is just exceptional!
Debra/dslak
I have 30 labels in my gmail account. A label is an organizational tool for email, much like a folder in Outlook. I think me having 30 labels (in use) pretty much answers the question.
peace|dewde
I only have about 300 e-mails in my inbox and Matt thinks that is alot. He is always trying to get me to clear some out.
He only keeps like 50 in his!
Things I am a pack rat about,
-b'day cards/any other greeting card that someone gives me,
-wedding invitations/shower invitations from the last 4-5 years,
-and I also save the program from every wedding I go to.
I have about 25 programs saved- which documents all of the weddings Matt and I have been to together. I started doing it to get ideas for our program and just never stopped.
I am pretty sure I have a couple hundred cards saved, like all the way back to my b'day's in elementary school.
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