I am on a deleting spree. With barely 10 days left in this office, I’ve started getting organised about which files to take, which papers to shred and most importantly, which documents to delete. I don’t want person who inherits this rickety chair and hundred year old computer (not to mention the footrest!) to accidentally open any half-written blog or mails from friends that I’d saved in ‘My documents’ coz they were hysterical.
Deleting’s a tedious job and I quite hate it. Especially when I realise that I have lovingly stored copy written as far back as July 2001. What if I needed that info some other time? Small wonder that my doddering computer crashed so often!
Being a newly-turned alert and methodical person, I’ve also proceeded to delete my entire contacts list, which means I’m now grovelling before the systems guys to retrieve it some way or the other.
Minor hitches apart some of it has been fun. I’ve dug out a story I did with a group of travelling musicians in Oslo, which for some reason I never sent my editor. Something told me her ‘Indian values’ wouldn’t quite appreciate a family where the daughter was openly in lust with a ‘borrowed’ percussionist and the merry group of father, mother, daughter and ‘borrowed lover’ got happily sozzled after a well-paying performance. I think it's a keepsake. :)
Then there is the promptly sent but never used story on child sexual abuse, which despite all our hard work over it, went into cold storage as they wanted a ‘happy cover.’ That document will be deleted of course but it’s proof that perhaps I needed to say bye to this place much earlier. The happiest has been finding the Malaysia story. I wrote it with a friend who’d been there. We came back from our trip, exchanged a huge number of giddy and hilarious emails and that’s what became our travel story. It was fun while it lasted haan, fellow emailer?