An Ode to Paper

I am a paper person. Always have been, always will be.

Today I was reminded how important paper is to me. I came across a box of floppy disks -- version 2, the small ones that had a plastic case so they weren't as floppy as the original style. They were from when I used a Mac computer, probably an Apple IIe or something you could buy back in 1990.

It makes me so sad to think that I can never retrieve any of the documents on those disks -- everything from Frosh English to articles I wrote in the graduate journalism program at Medill, in Chicago -- because the format is so out-of-date that I'd have to spend a month or so hunting down a computer that could still read them (if one even exists).

Worse is that I diligently printed lists of all the files on those disks, so I know exactly what's lost.

One can only imagine the details behind a story labeled "41-year-old Scumbag," from my legal reporting class at Medill.

The disk contained other stories from that class, including:

"Burton -- Please Kill Me"
A man who was serving a life sentence in prison was begging the court to sentence him to death, while the court refused to let him fire his public defender, who wouldn't enter this request on the man's behalf.

"Ghost"
City employees were on a ghost payroll and collected a salary without having to show up for work (where can I sign up?).

"Weddings Suck"
A woman's former fiance was suing her to get the deposits back from their canceled wedding. I remember calling her to ask if she wanted to comment, and feeling horrible that she didn't know about the lawsuit until I called.

I'm sure I saved some of my articles from Medill, but now I wish I'd saved everything. How was I to know 15 years ago that the data storage system would become obsolete?

Part of why these articles mean so much to me is that they remind me of a time when I was unencumbered, easily able to be the first one into the newsroom and one of the last ones out at the end of each day.

It was such fun to be, as my teacher Jim once called me, a #$% maniac who went so far as to bring a phone to plug into a jack spotted in the courthouse press room (I only made local calls; these were the days before cell phones and smart phones and all that; besides, if anyone had asked, I would have given them $20 toward the phone bill ...).

This is why there are file cabinets in my bedroom and boxes of clips in our closet. Marc and I keep paper copies of our work so that we'll have proof of our labor, no matter what happens in the world of computers.