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Information management.
It's hit me I haven't really said what my current gig is yet.
It's sorting and organizing and clearing through the papers of someone's estate so the house can be put onto the market this coming January. People my parents knew, a husband and a wife, hired me to deal with the husband's father's papers - he wrote nonfiction books and articles, worked in publishing and as a press agent, and had a basement, and when I say he kept everything, I'm not exaggerating. He kept old grocery store receipts from decades ago. They're all well-filed, labeled and arranged chronologically and by subject, and it's not just one cramped and messy office. It's not one cramped and messy office and an overflow closet. It's all that, a long and narrow basement's worth of boxes, years of books, decades of writing ranging from breastfeeding to baseball with a long history of adoring new technology and always being busy with something.
When I saw it all unfold, floor after floor, open door after open door, with just three months for everything, I knew I had my work cut out for me.
It's not physically demanding in the manner of digging ditches or cleaning up after pigeons, but it's difficult when it's your dad, or your beloved father-in-law. Which is where I come in. It's a lot easier for me to sort through several years' worth of quarterly royalty statements from international markets because it's just some letters about numbers instead of a reminder of someone they loved who's no longer with them.
Before the gig started, when we went over hours per day and days per week, I gave them two questions: how much they wanted to keep, and how they felt about scanning. I explained that in doing this kind of de-accessioning of personal documents, having a set amount they want to keep will make it easier to decide what makes the cut at the end - stuff like personal letters and photos. There's also stuff where what's on the paper is important, but the paper itself isn't necessary - old articles he wrote, anything related to specific contracts for publishing.
There's old VHS tapes to get rid of. There's some DVDs. There's old 3.5 inch floppies, old 5.25 inch floppies, ZIP drives, CDs, cassettes, digital audio tapes, microcassettes, USB drives, portable hard drives - basically a fifty year history of personal data storage technology, collected and tidied and worth a moment of wonder.
I've come across credit cards, business cards, a playing card, and his honorable discharge card. I've compiled a preliminary inventory of a coin collection. I found an axe in the basement and tossed decades-old spice blends out from the kitchen cabinets. I've tidied up books, I've arranged for good workflow, I'm making sure to wear a dress even when the clients aren't around because even though it's a casual job because the act of putting on the dress in the morning gets me in a professional mindset.
Mostly, I listen to music on my MP3 player and sort through stuff. It's pretty nice and it plays to my strengths of being left alone to get the work done, and I'm savoring that.
I also found that some of the personal correspondence I'd set aside for the clients to review themselves - I looked at it long enough to register it as something to set aside and nothing beyond that - turned out to be a set of love letters. Before the husband's mother and father were married, even before they were engaged, they wrote each other back and forth on what's now paper the texture of onion skin, the kind of old-fashioned behavior that, at the time, was simply behavior. It was simply how the world was, back then. The letters themselves don't meant as much to me as they do to the husband, but it was knowing I'd found them for him - not uncovering them as such, but bringing him something that made him so happy - that had me floating for a lot of this morning.
It's not the kind of moment I get working in offices.
It's sorting and organizing and clearing through the papers of someone's estate so the house can be put onto the market this coming January. People my parents knew, a husband and a wife, hired me to deal with the husband's father's papers - he wrote nonfiction books and articles, worked in publishing and as a press agent, and had a basement, and when I say he kept everything, I'm not exaggerating. He kept old grocery store receipts from decades ago. They're all well-filed, labeled and arranged chronologically and by subject, and it's not just one cramped and messy office. It's not one cramped and messy office and an overflow closet. It's all that, a long and narrow basement's worth of boxes, years of books, decades of writing ranging from breastfeeding to baseball with a long history of adoring new technology and always being busy with something.
When I saw it all unfold, floor after floor, open door after open door, with just three months for everything, I knew I had my work cut out for me.
It's not physically demanding in the manner of digging ditches or cleaning up after pigeons, but it's difficult when it's your dad, or your beloved father-in-law. Which is where I come in. It's a lot easier for me to sort through several years' worth of quarterly royalty statements from international markets because it's just some letters about numbers instead of a reminder of someone they loved who's no longer with them.
Before the gig started, when we went over hours per day and days per week, I gave them two questions: how much they wanted to keep, and how they felt about scanning. I explained that in doing this kind of de-accessioning of personal documents, having a set amount they want to keep will make it easier to decide what makes the cut at the end - stuff like personal letters and photos. There's also stuff where what's on the paper is important, but the paper itself isn't necessary - old articles he wrote, anything related to specific contracts for publishing.
There's old VHS tapes to get rid of. There's some DVDs. There's old 3.5 inch floppies, old 5.25 inch floppies, ZIP drives, CDs, cassettes, digital audio tapes, microcassettes, USB drives, portable hard drives - basically a fifty year history of personal data storage technology, collected and tidied and worth a moment of wonder.
I've come across credit cards, business cards, a playing card, and his honorable discharge card. I've compiled a preliminary inventory of a coin collection. I found an axe in the basement and tossed decades-old spice blends out from the kitchen cabinets. I've tidied up books, I've arranged for good workflow, I'm making sure to wear a dress even when the clients aren't around because even though it's a casual job because the act of putting on the dress in the morning gets me in a professional mindset.
Mostly, I listen to music on my MP3 player and sort through stuff. It's pretty nice and it plays to my strengths of being left alone to get the work done, and I'm savoring that.
I also found that some of the personal correspondence I'd set aside for the clients to review themselves - I looked at it long enough to register it as something to set aside and nothing beyond that - turned out to be a set of love letters. Before the husband's mother and father were married, even before they were engaged, they wrote each other back and forth on what's now paper the texture of onion skin, the kind of old-fashioned behavior that, at the time, was simply behavior. It was simply how the world was, back then. The letters themselves don't meant as much to me as they do to the husband, but it was knowing I'd found them for him - not uncovering them as such, but bringing him something that made him so happy - that had me floating for a lot of this morning.
It's not the kind of moment I get working in offices.
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