More House-Cleaning Strange Conversations
Posted 29 April 2009 in Strange Conversations by Catriona
And yet another house-cleaning conversation:
NICK (surveying his new desk): There! I think that looks much better.
ME: Well, sort of.
NICK: What do you mean?
ME: Well, there’s a dead moth in that box of CD cases, for example.
NICK: Those things are turning up everywhere!
ME: And I don’t think we need to keep that box.
NICK: What?
ME: The box that the TiVo wireless adaptor came in: I don’t think we need to keep it.
NICK: You keep saying such horrible, hateful things!
Well, I did move in with a man who keeps all his old bus tickets in a tissue box.
And, continuing the theme of “Nick won’t throw anything out, ever,” we had this conversation when I found him carefully storing an empty box on a shelf:
ME: No! Flatten it and throw it in the recycling!
NICK: But it’s such a lovely box!
ME: And?
NICK: We can store things in it.
ME: Such as?
NICK: Paper. And . . . stuff.
ME: Do you really want to find a place for it in the garage?
NICK: . . . No.
Seriously: this man keeps old calendars on the grounds that they’ll be accurate again one day. Before I moved in with him, I didn’t know one could have conversations like this:
ME: What’s that under Walt Simonson’s run on Thor?
NICK: Just magazines.
ME: That looks like a Dick Smith catalogue.
NICK: Maybe. Ooh, Hi-Fi Magazine.
One day, I’m going to be found buried alive under a stack of Dick Smith catalogues, bus tickets, and Batman calendars from 1987.
Share your thoughts [4]
1
Sam wrote at Apr 30, 09:03 am
Dick Smith catalogues- in fact all technology catalogues- ought to be kept for future archiving purposes. You’ll kick yourself if in 20 years to have a strange conversation with your kids saying “No believe me, back in the old days speakers were plugged into the computer with a cable. See here on this 20 year old Dick Smith catalogue… oh wait I threw it out 20 years ago. Damn.”
2
Catriona wrote at Apr 30, 12:48 pm
It’s not my place to archive that type of material for future reference, though. The average domestic space is not really suited (either in terms of space or in terms of temperature and humidity control) to serving as long-term archival storage.
If my putative children wish to see how we connected printers to the computer in 2009, they can simply upload their consciousnesses to the All Hail Big Brother! National Archive (For The Wellness and Wholeness of All Citizens) and download the archived images to their cerebral cortex, to be retrieved at their leisure.
3
Sam wrote at May 1, 10:34 am
Surely though the fact that your children need to connect to the information in such a, as would be considered today although not in the future, high-tech way would undermine the fact you are trying to show them what the olden days were like.
It is like showing baby pictures on print rather than facebook. Facebook is more convenient and usual these days, but the prints give a real sense of the age of the picture.
4
Catriona wrote at May 1, 10:53 am
Then, by your own argument, the most effective way to demonstrate the relatively low-tech days of my youth would be to show them an actual printer and/or printer cable.
Thankfully, Nick hoards those, as well.
I’m still not seeing an argument for stock-piling Dick Smith catalogues here, Sam . . .