Blogtrek

Packrats and pastburners

First, a few short snippets. I heard a media maven say that the airlines are all in the same boat. How can airlines be in a boat? They fly planes. The maven meant that the airlines were all in the same plane. I find that there are so many conniptions to using Microsoft Access that I feel it is an Access of Evil. We just had an incident in Iraq; maybe it was a case of "you zero us in, we zero you out."

Now the feature blogentation: One thing I find hard to do is to get rid of all the stuff I have accumulated in my lifetime, much of it junk. I.e., I tend to be a packrat at home. My attic is crammed with papers, and it takes time to sort through them all. But every once in a while, a record is needed somewhere, and I can find out what I was doing with it in 1983 or something. I would not have it if I had been throwing out all my stuff all along. It seems to me that a pattern like that should have a name; i.e., packrat should have an opposite. So let me invent one: pastburner. That will be my latest non-word of the week.

A pastburner is a person who continually throws out all or most past stuff and lives with only the present records. People who live in the here and now, mainly perceiving (P) types, tend to be pastburners. But I am a pastburner at work, for one good reason. During the last 12 years, there have been many reductions in force, moves, remodelings, and reorganizations and it seems that many of these put me in surroundings more cramped than before. This forces me to throw out stuff, and yes, it has hurt at times not to have the old records. Then again, what good are the old records? And what good are the present ones? The future often is different from both. Maybe we should question those who would want these records - other people, or perhaps, even ourselves.