We get a half-day on New Year’s Eve and it’s standard practice to spend the morning chucking out all of the rubbish accumulated over the year. We’ve been at it as usual this morning.
Now someone has just unearthed a folder of letters dating back to 1944 in a long-unopened box. Extraordinary how long this sort of stuff can be kept!
Scan and post!
Scan and post!
I’ve been doing the same office de-clutter thing bit by bit over the last week - and found my dad’s discharge papers from the late 1940s, the contract he and my mom signed for the one and only house they ever purchased, and other assorted stuff I’d taken from their house when they were moved to a nursing home. I hadn’t had much time to sort through any of it until recently.
It sounds like last year’s decluttering may have missed a spot. And the several dozen before that.
I don’t think that would be allowed. In any case, I’ve left work now and I’m on my way to the airport for a flight to Canberra.
Indeed!
The 40’s were great!
I’ve got some old newspapers found under some floorboards from that time. One has an advertisement for some kind of aftershave or something in a cartoon form. One of the lines is a guy saying, “You’ve queered me from every dame in San Francisco”.
Indeed!
One of these days I’ll get around to shredding my tax paperwork . . . beginning in the 60s.
Hope it wasn’t tossed out -
If nothing else it would make an interesting read for archives or whatever - or to scan and keep
No it wasn’t tossed. We put aside the whole lot for the records/archive people to look at in the new year.
Man, I thought we were sad for the IBM Selectric ball I found in our supply closet. No, we do not have a Selectric typewriter anymore and have not for at least the ten years I’ve worked here - I bet you any money we moved it from the old building in 1995.
Better yet, scan and forward to work colleagues, with a covering e-mail asking, “Did we ever resolve this issue?” See if anyone bites.
Hardly the same level, but back in 2013 someone found a Cliinton campaign poster in the office one day.
YES!
Bill, Hillary or DeWitt?
Thank you for putting my recent office decluttering efforts into perspective. I was thinking very bad thoughts indeed about my predecesser’s predecesser and all the totally useless and unnecessary files this person kept…dating back to…2004!
I feel very humbled now. 
I found an old fax machine - that old-fashioned belinograph kind with the revolving drum and the wire stylus.
I found an old opaquing pen (Kimoto Pake) that we used years ago when the print shop used film. I kept it because I love the name.
Some years ago one of the new brooms decided to rid the place of items that were not considered necessary but to my mind did have some relevance (museum wise).
Instead of destroying a register of decisions recording to the property of people who had passed away. I “acquired” it- I have it in front of me.
It was started in 1910 but refers to documents that were dated in 1898 etc, and the last notation in it is 1959.