Then I Just Pressed Delete

I am a natural hoarder. I come from a long line of hoarders - you should see the wood and metal and tools and guns Bloody Ern has hoarded in his shed.

So I'm a natural born hoarder but I fight it - well, I try to fight it. I try to restrict the hoarding to the absolutely necessary. [Grumpy feels that our definitions of "absolutely necessary" may not be completely in synch.]

My friend Scarab has been berating me of late for all the material I've hoarded over the years and not made into anything. She made me hang my head in shame.

But at work I'm a bit more stripped classical. Not literally. That would be cruel. I like to keep everything to a minimum. So imagine my surpreeez this morning when I found that since I moved into my new office in February, my email hasn't been set up to automatically delete everything in the delete box when I shut down. All this time, I've been hanging on to a stash of undeleted emails that has steadily grown to 2,364.

And I paused. Maybe, I thought, maybe I should just have a quick scroll through and see if there's anything in there I should keep. It was a terrible, terrible moment. I looked into the abyss and I saw two burning red coals looking back at me. I blinked. Then I just pressed delete. And, brothers and sisters, I was free.

Now I have set up my email to automatically empty the deleted items box. I don't need any more peeks into the darkness.