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Ones and zeros...

2007-09-27

Good morning Boys and Girls.

In front of me here on the desk is a little package of multi-colored "flags" I bought at Office Depot a few months ago to use to mark places I wanted to edit in the book I've worked on this year. They're called flags on the package, but they're really just itsy bitsy post-it notes the size of a piece of Scotch tape... Holy moly, did I just have to reference one 3M product to describe another?

Anyway...


I've never opened the things, and there's a thin patina of dust covering the package.

It made me think about all the things I've purchased over the years to use for some specific purpose, that for any number of reasons, I've never used.

A few weeks ago, I ran across a hundred-pack of 3.5" floppy discs in my stuff. Brand new and unopened, the cellophane wrapper shows a little discoloration. Why on earth, I wondered, would I still have these? Surely I haven't even owned a computer that can accept the things for more than five years.

Finding that while elephant inspired me go dig up my trusty old floppy disc storage tray. Probably the fifth or sixth I'd owned over the years - smaller ones slowly being combined and replaced by larger units that held more and more disks - this last model held at least a couple of hundred discs, and mine was filled almost to capacity, with each disc labeled in some fashion - and none of which I've inserted into a disc drive of any sort for years.

I opened the top drawer and thumbed through the tray within. Three columns of discs, each separated by two or three little movable flippers I remember finding annoyingly difficult to adjust. Suddenly  I found myself transported back fifteen or twenty years as I read my own writing on the many labels, most of which were abbreviated in a crude shorthand I developed specifically for the purpose, and one I found I couldn't immediately recall during my perusal.

Dozens of the discs held the names of companies for whom I did projects, with dozens more labeled with snippets of sentences or key words meant to help me recognize them for what they are. Many had the names of one of my kids or my ex, along with the project the thing contained: book reports, drawings, Christmas card ideas, recipes...

The little beige plastic disc dresser contains four good-sized drawers, and I eventually got around to opening the bottom one, where I knew I'd always kept my own personal stuff: "artistic" works in progress; story ideas and outlines; business and project ideas and the like. Goodness me, how many ideas I've had over the years, and how I always wished I could find one I could focus on for the rest of my days.

Suppose one of these days I'll buy a disc reader and go through the things, but it'll take weeks, and it's not something I felt the need to do then, so eventually, I just closed it up, never an easy thing to do being as full as it is and semi-flexible plastic being what it is.

-I'll bet thousands of hours of our time went into the creation of the millions of ones and zeros held on the hundreds of those little magnetic discs, and yet, I'll bet the contents of the whole damn dresser could be easily transferred onto a single DVD - something I should probably do at some point.

Surely there are a few things in there I'd feel bad about losing forever. There must be. The problem is, that frankly, I don't remember what any of them might be.



Be good to everyone.

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