Shaken Up When Cleaning out Office
Well this came as a surprise to me, I had to delete some of my "memory" in order to clean out my office this week. I had two different things I was trying to do while cleaning up: (1) minimize the amount of things I was leaving in the office for the new person and (2) minimize the amount of things I was bringing home. That led to some critical decisions, like what will I actually do with this book? I had a bunch of books that represented much of my technical library that I referred to as I performed various projects. I had to really think whether or not I would be reading those books after I retired. Some of them, like the PMBOK, were very easy to leave behind. Others, like the ones on UML, were less easy. But ultimately, I did decide those books that were important to me to keep for one reason or another. Most of those were in the category of "I would like to relearn that, just because." That means of course that once I relearn the thing I will probably dispose of the books anyway. I have had thoughts of auditing some classes at the local university just to keep my mind up to date on technical topics.
The problem was I came across some "memory" items that really caused me to pause before throwing them out. These were the Engineering Notebooks that I had accumulated over the years with my company. There were more than 20 notebooks I tossed. That really hurt, because my notebooks were the heart and soul of my technical vocation. I had notes from every meeting, every telecon, every issue that I researched, every design and architecture direction that I took and why, and a lot of other things, like personal thoughts on interactions with people. It's hard to give that up when you have lived through so many projects. But, "the project you work on today will be in someone's landfill 25 years from now", is my mantra. So I gave them up and somehow I started out empty, but slowly the light dawned on me that this is behind me now. So retirement will actually be a change of direction, old things are past me now, I don't have my "memory" to keep that in the back of my head - and now I can push forth in the new.