No such thing, am I right? My house in Turtle Shores was a masterpiece of storage space. Even though it was already so spacious that it needed dressers and armoires, the original owners filled every nook and cranny with concealed shelving, drawers, and cabinets. I added to it with built-in bookshelves and file cabinets disguised as furniture. I had no problem adopting the memorabilia of both our parents, and I still never used up all that storage. That was the fun part.
The unfun part was trying to find things I stored. Case in point, my early Christmas shopping inevitably got stashed and forgotten.
Did you know that technology does this to us without asking? We used to be so frugal with disk space that we often had to sacrificially clear it out just to keep working. Now, the switch has flipped. Digital storage is so cheap it has become clutter. Things we don’t consciously keep are still kept for us.
In a recent computer class my student wanted to know, “Where is that thing I downloaded?” She needed to send it to someone and couldn’t find it in her phone. Well, the word ‘phone’ is misleading. It implies a single place. Ha! A smart phone stores stuff in about five different places, and its dedicated ‘file storage’ is the least used.
In fact, a phone is only one branch of the tree of digital life. I have grown accustomed to running down one branch after another looking for stuff I am convinced is stored somewhere. I figured it’s time to raise awareness about this artificial intelligent stashing run amok.
Let’s count the file cabinets in this one person’s life:
- Home file cabinet
- Office file cabinet
- Phone storage called ‘My Files’
- Laptop storage called ‘My Documents’
- Google Drive cloud storage
- Gmail attachments
- Google Photos
- Text message attachments
- Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage
Phew! We almost reached TEN file cabinets. Mine reaches nearly 20, counting multiple Microsoft and Google accounts, plus Norton security backups, plus web servers, plus external hard drives and flash drives. Wow. Mine might be pushing 30 file cabinets by now. Nevermind the labyrinth of folders in those places. And I hate to admit it, but I’ve been longing for access to my old AOL and Bellsouth storage. I hope I saved all that to some external drive somewhere.
So, where is that thing you downloaded? Well, as any good spouse will say, where did you put it?
There is one action you have control over. Next time you click ‘Save’, where will you put it?