Category: Queensland

We used to tease my poor old Grandad about how he kept so much stuff. His cupboards were full of tins and packets of food, and his garage was on another level. He had anything and everything, from pieces of wood, bits of metal, and even old tennis balls. He just couldn’t throw anything away. You never know when it might come in useful, eh.

A few decades later and I look around me and I think it might be genetic. I can’t throw things out, and even worse (and to my wife’s dismay) I won’t sell things either. After all, you never know when they will come in handy.

On top of the cupboards in my office I have the empty boxes of items that I bought. They are for the more expensive items, like cameras, computers, speakers, etc. but I do keep boxes for most things, at least for a bit. What I do do is to go through them every couple months and throw out the less important boxes that clearly won’t be needed to return an item. Similarly, every now and then we go though the garage or the shed where we store everything else and have a good old purge. We throw things out that missed the last purge, and items that just are not worth keeping anymore. We can thank the silverfish and other insects or larger animals for that. There are clearly checks and balances in place.

But for me this goes beyond the physical. I hoard data. My data, my family’s data, backups of the data, backups of backups… I can’t bring myself to delete it. You never know when you might need it!

Of course, data doesn’t use up any physical space. Cloud storage can be upgraded, storage devices can be bought. Only this weekend I was running low on storage on my main NAS so I could either go through it all, worry about whether I can delete this or that, and then choose what should go, and that’s a lot of time and effort required right there, or I could jump onto Amazon or Umart and just order some larger hard drives.

I sat down in front of my computer and started to look though… yeah nah, that wasn’t going to happen. Easier to order a couple of 12TB drives and pick them up from the supplier. Ordering, collecting, and then swapping out the first drive took about an hour in total. Too easy. The second drive will go in when space runs low again. My data hoarding credentials are in tact. No data was harmed in this story.

Now the question I have is, is this normal? They say that no matter how much storage you have, whether physical or for data, you will fill up 80% of it in no time. I actually think, as I speak with people about here and there, that many people will hold on to things. My fellow residents of Queensland are a testament to this. A drive up the coast towards Wide Bay and the evidence is all around, in the front and back yards of the scattered properties. Old cars, washing machines, car tyres… it’s all there and might come in useful one day. Perhaps.

I really do think that most people are naturally averse to throwing out anything that might be of use or needed one day. It wasn’t just my Grandad and me, but many people are just like that. It’s just practicalities that get in the way, like running out of space, being moaned at by the uninitiated, and wanting to keep the place tidy. But deep down we all want to hold on to things. You never know, you might need them one day.