At church, one of my responsibilities is handling the finances for our congregation. As such, I have a (shared) office area for processing funds, managing reports, and so on. For months I’ve told myself I need to take a day to clean out the office, because there are some cabinets that contain books and things I know are outdated and no longer useful. Today was that day.
As I began going through the cabinets, drawers, shelves, and file folders, the weight of history gradually became apparent. I’d already seen the old WordPerfect software manual (I used WordPerfect back in the mid-1990s and it was a great word processor). But then I came across some 3.5″ floppy disks with backups dated 1992:
I was pretty sure we didn’t need these any more. I chucked them into one of the trash bags I was filling.
Deeper in that cabinet was something even older: a set of four 5.25″ floppy disks used to install church financial software!
Sheesh. Into the trash.
I kept going. I went for some more trash bags. The pile was getting bigger. Tucked in the back of a cabinet was a box of paper rolls for adding machines…
Oh, and three adding machines. Because everyone uses those, when we’ve had calculator apps on our phones for at least twenty years. I wondered if they could be used for an interesting hobby project, but decided that a literal mile of adding-machine paper probably wasn’t going to come in handy any time soon. Trash.
Let’s not forget the replacement letter wheel for a Brother typewriter! Sadly, the typewriter was nowhere to be seen.
There were so many things like this: artifacts from thirty and forty years ago, stashed in file drawers or stuffed in a box on the back of a shelf behind twenty massive three-ring binders filled with policy documents with dates in the late 1980s. It was staggering. I think sometimes people are afraid to throw away things because… hey, they might be useful one day! But as I shook my head at each new discovery, I felt like no one would ever miss these things.
At the end of the day, I had at least a dozen trash bags filled with stuff, as well as boxes and binders and assorted things that filled the back of our Honda CR-V. I drove straight from the church to the dump and that was the end of it.
My little archaeology expedition was both shocking and fascinating. And now the office has shelves and cabinets that are completely bare. But maybe in forty years, a few things from today will be tossed out by a future financial clerk, and the cycle will repeat…