Those Were The Days

Purge. Purge. Purge.

Scan. Scan. Scan.

We have thousands of pages of paper stored in bankers boxes. Invoices. Warranties. Travel documents. Tax returns. Basically all sorts of paper going back for most of our married life — said married life is now approaching 37 years.

We have at least 30 or so boxes of papers. Probably more as I have been reluctant to count them all.

And I broke down last week. Time to deal with all of that paper. Time to let the paper go. Be free, paper. Be free.

Over the past few years I had made the transition to a fully paperless office for all new and incoming papers. I toss what I do not need and I digitize what I wish to keep. I use a Fujitsu scanner and I send everything to an Evernote filing cabinet. Quick, painless and easily accessible.

The majority of paper in the old bankers boxes can be tossed. Some of it will have to be shredded but rather than sort through every file folder and every document to pull out the papers that need to be shredded, we will use a shredding service for all of it. Just in case.

Some documents bring back great memories like the invoice pictured above. It was not all that long ago that the Internet did not exist. I subscribed to a number of online bulletin boards and I used something called a modem to connect to their service. Canadian-Micro BBS was a local bulletin board in London, Ontario. The Sysop was Paul Tonini. I spent many hours reviewing technical documents on that BBS. And the year was 1994.

And so, for those pages that bring back good memories, into Evernote they go. A digital time capsule of sorts. I’ll have to make sure that my family knows how to get into that digital time capsule.