“Remoted” – Day 534 (Wednesday)

Treasures are found when least expected, and often seem brutally elusive when actively sought.

A couple months ago, I checked a couple old email accounts to look for a message on an old stock thing from before husband number two when I had a different last name and used a different email account. There were several old accounts, including one used for freelance writing projects, one for photography, one for personal messages.

It had been a while, maybe years, since I last checked the old accounts. Surprise! The accounts still exist, but the contents were gone. All of it – inbox, sent, drafts – empty. It was depressing. I guess the mail servers purge content from accounts after a long period of inactivity. Oops.

Worse than just the specific missing stock message – there were also writings I had done years ago. Some of the content was freelance work, in other cases, it was personal writing I sent to myself so it could be stored on the email server for “safekeeping.” This was my great plan from before the cloud and back when technology had already rendered my floppy disks obsolete, but before PCs stopped having disk drives to read the storage that followed. The rate of change and built-in obsolescence of technology is infuriating.

Treasure found!

Yesterday, I was looking for work samples from my old agency job for ideas for a current project. I remembered working on brochures with crazy panel counts and interesting fold patterns. I found one potential piece in a folder labeled “samples,” along with another folder containing something even more exciting – hard copies of several old pieces of my writing, including two done while in Korea. The Korea stories were definitely in one of the old email accounts because I had sent them to friends while still in there, and in the box of 3.5 inch floppy disks chucked before moving back from Tennessee. 

Now, if I could just find the rest of the old work samples I’m sure I have. Oh, and the rest of the volumes of writing of long ago, including that paper on "The Wife of Bath" written in college. A hard copy of that stock email I was looking for would also be super swell.