American (Old, Private) Media and "A"s American Life

What:  3 1/2 floppies, old software CDs, a few cassette tapes, and cases for many of them.
Origin:  Various, business and personal.
How long kept:  Uh, some of the floppies dated back to 1995.   One of the cassettes, 1988.
Why kept:   Aaaargh.   Mostly, I Might Need Them. 

That Multinational Management paper from in 1995, written with two favorite classmates?   Yeah, important.

But really, some of the old floppies probably do bear information that I don't want floating out there in the world, and I didn't know how to efficiently destroy them.   So I had a plastic shoebox (Storage Boxes are Evil) full of them up in the closet (Out of Sight, Out of Mind).
Destination:  Greendisk.com, to be destroyed and recycled.

Confession:  There was an earlier release of cassette tapes and cases to the NYC waste stream (before I learned about Greendisk);  I retained a few unlabeled tapes.

This week,  I listened to them.   It was like an episode of This American Life:  "Episode 3, What "A" Found in Her Closet."

Sometimes, I used to to tape the radio,  for reasons that I can't seem to call to mind -- though the St. Paul Sunday (I think) feature on Dvorak was lovely.   Weekend Edition coverage of the Timothy McVeigh trial, not so much.   The Jane Fonda aerobics audio tape, hilarious.

The motherlode, two unlabeled tapes: 

• For about 6 weeks in early 1988, I lived on a drug-riddled street in Hoboken.   (Probably hard to believe today).   A friend who was then living in Japan had suggested that we exchange audio tapes.  So, I'm making coffee and talking to my friend, and describing the Hoboken PD's early morning visit to my building that day.   Priceless.
• An answering machine tape...filled on both sides with the summer of, I think, 1990.   Some friends I still know, others who have moved on.   Nostalgia.   (The good kind, actually.)

Confession, part deux:   The last two items?   Not in that box for Greendisk.  (Sticky.)

Bonus:   We'll be joined by another blog friend soon, blog handle TBD.   Hearing her voice on the tape was a good thing!

Bonus (cont):   I was able to send this Fedex ground for a bit more than $10, trip to Kinkos:  10 minutes (some kind of record for Kinkos).  The trip to the PO, who knows...if there had been a line, it could have been more than a half hour.   And we might have gotten into fisticuffs about the wine box I was sending it in.   Postal regulations prohibit re-using liquor boxes.   I did obliterate all logos (like duct tape, black gesso has 1001 uses).   But who knows.

Stay warm.