February 23, 1989
Dear Everyone:
I am “actively pursuing destruction”. Not as dangerous as it sounds.
Remember back in October when I sent out all those Destruction Review Reports? No? Neither do a lot of the people that I sent them to.
These were computer-generated lists of boxes in the “Livermore” Records Center which had passed their review dates. Boxes that are ready, one might even say eager, to be destroyed. All the owners have to do is look over the list and initial boxes that can be destroyed. If they have a reason to “hold” the box, they put a reason next to the box number.
Simple, right? Apparently not, since most of them have not been returned to us yet. So, I’m calling the Records Coordinators to follow up on them; Records Coordinators are the people in each organization or department who received the reports and parceled them out to the individual owners in their groups.
Here’s where we run into a problem.
Company is not just a company, remember; it’s a living organism comprised of hundreds of thousands of individual cells, each growing, dying, mutating.
Especially mutating. I called one, “Karen Sharpe” to learn that she had turned into “Barbara Todd”. “Barbara” said that she would look into the matter of Destruction Review and get back to me. (Translation: The check is in the mail.) When “Barbara” called me back, she had metamorphosed into “Rob Edwards” who had no idea what I was talking about, but was willing to learn – could he come to my office with his file? Sure. He showed up, file in hand, and it took only minutes to find and explain how to do the Destruction Review. Terrific. He’ll get right on it and shoot it back to me.
Needless to say, I have not heard from “Rob” since.
Further on down the road, I called “Nelson McCarthy” to check on progress in his group. “Nelson” had evolved into – “Karen Sharpe”! Old Comproids never die, they just keep moving around until they read minimum retirement age. Kind of like playing Chinese Checkers with people instead of marbles.
Still, I’ve made some progress. I only have two people left of my list to call, one in Colorado and one in Salt Lake City. Don’t ask me how these people got boxes into the “Livermore” Records Center instead of “Casper”. Just lucky, I guess.
Actually, it’s more difficult to get hold of people in that time zone than it is in the others. Because there’s only a one hour difference, when they’re at lunch, you’re not; when they come back from lunch, you just left. It shortens the time-span in which to connect. Maybe I should try PROFS.
In other news…
Now that “Jeannie” is moving, she has to deal with her pennies. For years, she always dropped her change into a big, blue glass jar. When we needed quarters for the laundry, I used to dig through the jar until I found enough. Once, I even separated the dimes and nickels into separate jars; but this attempt at organization was ignored and coins kept landing in the big, blue glass jar.
Until now. “Jeannie” isn’t about to box up this very heavy jar with all the coins in it. The carrier charges by weight. So, she went to the Credit Union and got some wrappers for rolled coins. When I stopped by last weekend, she had divided the coins into new containers (including the nickel and dime jars that I had done before). Many of the nickels and dimes had been rolled, wrapped and placed back in to the big, blue glass jar. Most of the pennies were still unrolled. So, while I was there, I rolled as many as I could until I ran out of wrappers.
Then on Sunday, I was looking through some drawers for something when I ran across a bunch of coin wrappers that I still had. You see, I had had the idea, a couple of years ago, that if I rolled and wrapped all those coins, they might make a substantial contribution towards the down payment on my condo. Never got around to it.
So now I drove down to “Jeannie’s” to see “Marshall” who was visiting last weekend and rolled more pennies. I used up 17 wrappers, but there’s still a lot of pennies to go.
“Marshall” and “Jeannie” went into the City last Saturday, by the way, blissfully unaware that it was the day of San Francisco’s single, largest cultural event: The Chinese New Year’s Day Parade. They couldn’t figure out why the streets were so crowded until they read about it in Sunday’s paper.
Also in the news…
Last Thursday, “Ashley Holtz” came to me with a problem. He had forgotten that he would be out Friday, Monday would be a Holiday, Tuesday he would be in Company Park and Wednesday was the AIIM Conference which he would be attending. The problem: He needed volunteers to man the ARMA table at the AIIM Conference and he wouldn’t be around to ask for said volunteers until Thursday which would be a day late. Never mind that “Ashley” seems to be always a day late, would I try to scare up some volunteers? Sure.
On Friday, I put it to the group. Was anyone willing to spend an hour sitting at the ARMA table at the AIIM Conference?
(ARMA is the Association of Records Managers and Administrators. Most of the people in my group are members. “Ashley” is a Vice-President and is aiming for President of the local chapter. AIIM is the Association of Image and Information Management. Their specialty is microfilming. The two groups are very friendly; they always get invited to each other’s conferences and conventions.)
No one was interested in attending, even if it meant getting to see the vendor’s exhibits for free. I admitted that sacrifices would have to be made. You’d have to leave before lunch to get there in time to eat and see all the exhibits before taking your turn at the ARMA table. You might even have to answer some simple questions if anyone actually stopped at the table for information. And, what’s worse, if you ended your turn at the table and there were no more exhibits to see, you might have to go home early.
It would even mean having to cancel our “standing game” of Trivial Pursuit, which we play every Wednesday at lunch time.
Put that way, 3 of us volunteered. I counted about 8 vendors. Since my turn at the table ended at 2:00, I got home about 3½ hours before I usually did. This was nice because it gave me a chance to clean the place up a bit. “Diana” [“Byron’s” wife] is arriving tonight for a conference of her own. She’ll be here a couple of days, and then “Jeannie” will move in with me while we finish boxing up EVERYTHING she owns, except the cat.
Love, as always,
Pete
PS. Re: The weekly game of Trivial Pursuit. Would you believe that I missed the same question twice? One Christmas at the folks’ place, we were playing teams and Mother, Dad and I got the question: Who was Nixon’s running mate in 1960? Dad said it was “that idiot from upstate New York”, but this was not accepted as being specific enough.
A couple of weeks ago, I got the exact same
question and I couldn’t answer it again!
So much for memory.
It was Henry Cabot Lodge.
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