Pre-Digital History Washes Away in Flood

My return home from the desert was not stress-free. Somehow I managed to lose two credit cards, after some 20 years of never having lost anything of value -- with the costly exception of several relationships. I'd even memorized those 16-digit account numbers!

Any sequence of numbers eventually becomes like an old friend. But after searching my luggage, and checking with the resort, I concluded that they had vaporized or had been hijacked by aliens, so I canceled both accounts.

Out with the old; in with the new. Change is good. I'll just get cozy with two new 16-digit sequences.

At the house, the carpet in my laundry room was saturated with water. Turned out an ancient cast-iron pipe had fractured in an inside-out, rust-driven, jagged line north to south.

Rich came over today, cut the pipe high and low, and mounted a new PVC "band-aid" and tightened it over the remaining cast-iron original sections. Good as new, at least for now.

Anyway, the point of this story is that many of my old magazine stories and clippings were in cardboard boxes in that laundry room, along with various tax records, journals, and letters. Some of them were ruined beyond repair. As I tossed them into the garbage, I figured this is a good thing.

There is a major dilemma for those of us pack-rats whose lives and careers span the decades before the Internet era and today's world. Now, every bit of information is digital and theoretically able to be saved indefinitely -- or at least as long as the servers hosting this content remain viable.

What to do with all the old stories? They need to be scanned and digitized. The paper versions are rotting away anyway. I doubt anyone will ever want to sort through my old articles. There are literally hundreds of them, barely if at all indexed or even listed anywhere I'm aware of.

I can't help wishing I had a library intern volunteer, or somebody like that, who could scan in all of this stuff before it disappears form history. The flooding of my laundry room woke me up to the fact that being a pack-rat is not a wise strategy going forward.

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