Career Cleanup
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My Office BEFORE (07 Aug 2013) and AFTER (23 Aug 2013) Cleanup
Jess H. Brewer
In July 2011 I officially retired from the University of British Columbia (UBC) after a 38-year career in Physics, the last 34 of which I spent as various types of Professor. As a new Professor Emeritus, I enjoyed free parking for the first time (one of the most intelligent decisions of the UBC Administration) and was able to keep my old office for several more years, thanks to my brilliant strategy of accepting the very worst office in the Department long ago.
But eventually the Department hired more new faculty than they had room for, and I received the dreaded Email requesting me to vacate my ancient den. This meant sorting out and removing four decades' worth of accumulated treasures and unfinished business. I expected to be in shock at the prospect, since I am by nature a hoarder; but to my surprise I rather looked forward to it.
I retired, you see, because I wanted to get on with the career I had postponed since 1971, when I was seduced by the idea of using muons to study "ordinary" matter -- a science fiction idea if there ever was one. The main reason I went to graduate school at Berkeley in the first place was to obtain a PhD in Physics, certifying my credibility as a SF writer. But now here was a chance to actually play a character in my own SF novel in real life. So I did. And it went very well. Much better than I had any right to expect, in fact, and by the time I published my first SF short story in 2007 I had over 300 publications in scientific journals -- a clear case of "credibility overkill". It was time to get serious. This explains the new Quip I coined for the occasion:
"You can't start a new career while clutching the bones of an old one."
So there I was, facing a stack of boxes and piles of books and papers (see BEFORE pictures), mostly filed "stratigraphically" as in Geology -- I could locate almost any document by finding the right "topic pile" and digging down to the epoch when it was "filed" there. But then I had to actually do something with it, because there was no practical way to reinsert it into the fossil record; this discouraged such retrieval, with predictable consequences. A number of boxes labeled "To Read - URGENT" had been shipped abroad on at least one sabbatical (because I would surely find time to read them then) and shipped back unread.
After a day of pulling out individual documents, remembering why I had kept them all those years, and reluctantly dumping them into the big blue recycling bins ("Paper Only!") I began to loosen up. I began by setting aside one copy of each old paper in my REPRINTS filing cabinet (in case I found time to scan them into the computer, where I now do all my hoarding) and dumping all the rest. Then I dumped all the old exam papers, then the old exams (they were on the computer already, after all). Then I attacked the financial records of all my NSERC grants over the years. That was fun! Then a couple of boxes of refereeing reports (at least the recent ones are in the computer) and other correspondence.
Old letters were really hard to throw away, because they are about one's life, not about one's work. I had a hard time getting through that quickly, because there were people I didn't want to forget about. Then I realized that if I could forget them, I probably should, because the above Quip about careers also applies to relationships. You need to make room for new ones. In the end, I kept a few boxes of key memorabilia, mostly in the form of handwritten letters and notes.
Notes... ah, that was also hard. Notes I took during lectures or meetings captured my state of mind at those times better than any amount of formal documentation. I'm glad I went through those files carefully, as I discovered that during particularly long and intense scientific meetings I would retreat into Poet-Space and write all my notes in haiku form, thus expressing my frustration at having an overflowing brain and at the same time thumbing my nose at the formal restrictions on poetic style: while those notes obeyed the strict 5-7-5 syllabic line structure, they almost all violated the proper spirit of haiku in the most offensive way possible.
After 3 days I was exhausted emotionally and physically (after filling an even dozen of the big blue bins) so I gave up trying to sort the wheat from the chaff and shoved the rest into boxes to be stored in various places for future sorting and/or disposal. The residual stuff was maybe 5-10% of the original pile, and I had retrieved a number of "lost treasures" in the process.
How do I feel now? Liberated! Ready to get on with my writing career. But still a little emotionally bruised, recovering slowly.
Will I ever indulge in such hoarding again? Of course! As I said, it's all in the computer. At least hard drive backups are cheap and they don't take up much physical space. I'm sure there will be new "21st Century problems" as people discover that the filing system they used for small amounts of information doesn't work for terabytes' worth. But that's another story....
