Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Spent Some Time Deanalizing Today And It Feels Good

Yes, I spelled deanalizing (de-anal-izing) correctly since I just made up the word. I've been a records keeper for a long time, at least since my college days when it was important to keep copies of things like my transcripts. The need to kept records also was necessary for my tax returns, not so much before and during college but afterward when I got into my federal LE career as a Border Patrol Agent many frigging moons ago. Of course, being a federal agent required a lot of record keeping for the job too, both official records and personal personnel records relative to it and health insurance records and tax records and personal records for renter's insurance and auto insurance and yada yada yada. That all expanded even more after my transfer into the U.S. Customs Service, especially after I became a criminal investigator and Special Agent; there were lots more official records relative to my work. Then I got married and bought a house and got several more credit cards than the one I had up until then, added family health insurance, medical bills, mortgage payments, life insurance records, auto and homeowner's insurance records, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on...ad infinitum it seems. Then there were also the firearms records for guns I bought and sold over the years.

In general, my record keeping was less than perfect. It's not like I neglected to keep records but that my filing system absolutely sucked - at least for personal records related to any of the above. At work, I was required to maintain a certain level of proficiency in keeping records and while I maintained my files within regulations (for the great part) that is not to say that the files kept were as good as they could have been. The required stuff was virtually in my files but sadly sometimes in a bit of a shambles. Well, when it came to me keeping personal records, it was worse, those files were often a mess. Yeah, I was pretty friggin anal in that I kept things for many years that others may have destroyed after a year or two at most and my records were probably not anywhere as neatly pigeon holed away as they should have been. Thus I often kept records, in my files, that just were not needed within them, just thrown into them in any random manner and as I said to excess. Every now and then I would go through what I had and deanalzie my files, or in other words, I'd try to remove the shit that I did not need in them and organize what I did need to keep for awhile longer.

I did that today for most of my archived records. It took me most of four hours of my otherwise not so precious time. I enjoyed a cocktail or thee after finishing up with it. What it amounted to was me throwing away, things mostly like bill payment records, that I have had since as far back as 2009. I guess that must have been the year I last did so. There were a few records dating even further back, such as an electricians bill/receipt from September 1995. I will likely never throw that one out, it was from the first or second year (I think the first year) that we have owned our current house and the work was performed by an electrician I had known for at least 25 years before that who had dome work for my mom and before her for my great-grandfather. Some things, even records hold a place in the nostalgia of my life. Anyway, I narrowed down most of my records to those from the last year or two depending on what type of record. I will keep some records that are much older, such as tax records (probably for 5 to 7 years) and firearms records (probably for my forever relative to those records I have archived). So, as it wound up, I probably threw away 10-15 pounds or so of what amounted to useless paperwork. That was a lot of deanalizing! I feel better now, a bit like someone gave me an enema (which is uncomfortable at best when being undertaken just as was the purging of my records). I just feel a great relief because the after effects of the deanalzing make me feel as if I finally shit out  whatever it was that had once constipated my file keeping life.

I am now enjoying a cocktail of success because I am less of a filled up asshole than I was before. Hopefully I will not revert to that state of archived constipation ever again.

All the best,
Glenn B

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