Human Response

Streamlining

Long ago there was a spreadsheet software program called Lotus. It made doing projects involving many numerical calculations remarkably easy. I became quite proficient with it while doing multi million dollar budget planning for the Marketing Department at Walt Disney World in the mid 1990′s. It gave us the ability to look at options, to provide managers and management instant feedback on how decisions they could make would affect the whole.

Lotus lost out on the spreadsheet software game and was replaced by Excel, the Microsoft product. I never learned Excel as well as Lotus. My carefully managed and manipulated Lotus files were tossed and recreated in Excel by somebody else. Today, nobody even mentions Lotus. I figured Excel out but it will never be the factor in my life that Lotus was.

Three months ago, our household switched to Macintosh computers. After 20 years of PCs, resisting the Apple way, my husband, Mark, marched us down to the Apple Store in Palo Alto, and I came home with a MacBook. (He had to wait for his new machine as they were all out of the model he wanted.)

Just as leaving Lotus behind involved some aggressive ‘streamlining’ on my part, so did the move to Apple. My 2200 contacts were somehow compromised. Probably due to a macro downloaded to niggle how contact names appeared, files swelled to 3500 and developed crossover data that would have been disastrous except that the corrupted data was so funny and clearly not life threatening. The glitch jumbled phone numbers and emails and transferred the name of a business, restaurant or chocolate shop to any contact that didn’t have a title or business listed. It was as if the macro was handing out career advice, dinner invitations or had become a gourmet eating club. Any contact without an address was given mine as if we should all show up there together for a gathering of kindred souls.

The Apple Store Genius Bar person took care of the mad macro, but the damage to my contact filewas permanent. I had to clean up the mess, a 2 day process. When I finished going through every single contact, deciding whether to keep, toss or fix, 1300 entries were left. Besides eliminating the corrupted files, I deleted contacts I’d kept because ‘you never know when you will need them’, the roofers and plumbers for every house I’d ever lived in, former colleagues I never hear from, former babysitters, committee members from boards on which I no longer serve, cleaning ladies who’ve retired, acquaintances who send a printed card at Christmas, car dealer service managers for cars I no longer own, school principals, counselors, tutors, coaches and PTA presidents who have nothing to do with my now fully adult children, and vets for pets who died.

As I went through each entry, deciding whether to keep or toss, I came to a new place in thinking about all these people I’d known at some time in the past. I’d kept track of everybody because I could. It was so easy to enter them into the database just in case I might need to contact them in the future. This jump to a new platform caused me to keep just what I need, the people who are active in my life or I’m present in theirs.

This process of streamlining through change is never comfortable. We only do it when forced. The disruption, the need to make the keep/toss decisions, the reevaluation of what is important, the liklihood that there is stuff we will never do again, is all hard. Cleaning up my contact list was nothing compared to the cleaning out attics, basements, closets, drawers, files and garages forced by movement from one lifestage to the next. What was once important is no longer and we move on to thinking about ourselves and how we spend our time very differently.  This is where the value is.  We can now think about ourselves very differently.

Except about chocolate. I did keep every single entry in my files about chocolate.

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