I'm not the kind of guy who always
keeps up with things. “Things” being those niggling chores around
the house. I'll kick into high gear when I know company's a'comin',
but otherwise, a little dust here or some clutter in an
out-of-the-way spot where I don't have to constantly look at it there
gets a pass.
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| Spare bedroom renovation continues: The new closet is now primed. |
Cleaning out my upstairs spare bedroom
of the life's flotsam collected there over the eight years I've lived
in Greenville has been part of that room's refurbish. The room has
admirably served as a storage area for unpacked boxes, still
partially filled cardboard wardrobes and assorted brick-a-brac that
mysteriously accumulates over years of indiscriminate keeping in
lieu of selective tossing out. It didn't quite attain the level of a
hoarder's lair, but there was a lot of crap in there that I didn't
need, never used and should never have held on to in the first place.
Several boxes of stuff I may use again
someday, such as Christmas decorations, I transferred to the new
shed. A couple of unopened boxes that managed to survive a series of
moves over the course of four decades, were opened, weaned of
worthless items and consolidated into one box before the trip to the
shed; no doubt not to be looked at again until some poor relative
sifts through my puny belongings after my passing. Still remaining
in the room are a few odds and ends, whose fate is stalled by my
ambivalence. I'll deal with them one way or another once the room is
finished.
Squirreled away amid this mass of junk
was an industrial trash bag stuffed with mail, papers, financial odds
and ends, and other items displaying my contact or personal
information. In other words, stuff someone could use to burgle my
identity – for all the good that would do them. It was easily
20-to-25 pounds of paperwork. Some of it moved with me from Florida.
The rest accumulated here during those periods when I was without a
shredder.
This mountain of trash had to go, but
where and how? I have a shredder; but not only would shredding it
take days, no every-day home shredder could possibly hold up under
scores of hours of relentless shredding. I could always haul the bag
to a commercial shredder. However, I'm just paranoid enough not to
trust someone else with my financial info – I mean, that was the
point of holding onto this sea of paper in the first place – and
besides, I don't like paying someone else to do something I am
perfectly capable of doing myself.
My solution was to burn the offending
materials in my fireplace. So far I have conducted three burns and
still roughly one-third of it remains.
Working through 15 years of mail is as
revealing as an archaeological dig. As I have burrowed down from the
more recent mail to the older, I've discovered major shifts in the
types of junk mail I've received over the years.
Today my junk mail consists mostly of
solicitations from TV providers. A tidal wave of paper from Direct
TV, Dish TV and Charter Cable fills my mailbox on nearly a daily
basis. I can't even estimate the tons of paper these services destroy
each year trying to poach my business from ATT Uverse. Eighty percent
of the mail I currently shred is related to TV-content providers.
This was also the case with the most recent layers of junk mail in my
junk-mail bag.
As I have worked my way back in
junk-mail time, however, I am reminded of a happier era before there
was much in the way of TV-content-provider choices. My junk mail from
a decade ago is mostly financial in nature. Credit-card companies
vying for my business provided the bulk of my junk mail.
“Pre-Approved” stamped in red ink decorates the front of many of
these envelopes. “Transfer Current Balances” coaxes opening
headlines of the letters the envelopes contain.
Yes, times have changed and with it the
nature of junk mail. But come it still does. Thankfully, though,
today's junk mail is more likely to be in the form of e-mails. I
delete at least 20 e-mails each and every day from sources and on
topics I don't give a hoot about.
Although not happy about the daily
“delete” ritual, at least the only thing wasted is my time: not
paper. And, I don't have to shred the damn things.
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