Preparing for a move: rigorous cleaning (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

In a few weeks my department at $CLIENT will be moving into a new office building across the street. This of course entails that all of us will be packing up our stuff to take with us. Unfortunately this department has been gathering cruft since some of the colleagues have been with the company for over fifteen years. Our team was given six book cases to store all of our stuff (aside from the usual drawers of our desks) and all of them were filled with binders upon binders of documentation, some of it dating back to 1989! That's like the Jurassic Age of computing!

Personally, I love cleaning and there's nothing I like more than a tidy workplace. Since most other people usually can't be bothered with cleaning I took the task upon me to go through each bookcase and get rid of all the unneeded things. Most of the binders contained printed manuals from the 1990's or e-mail conversations about projects long forgotten. It's stuff like this that people in IT usually cling onto with the excuse that "it might come in handy" in the future; an incorrect sentiment in 99% of the cases. In the end we got rid of at least three big wastecarts of paper.

The only thing I regret is not waiting for one of our team's dinosaurs as he seemed genuinly hurt that I got rid of a huge pile of stuff. I repsect the guy tremendously (he's a nice and smart guy who has a lot of experience) and I hate the idea that I hurt him. I'm still sture that everything I tossed would've gone anyway, but it would've been better to let him sort through the pile with me. *sigh* Live and learn.

Posted in: archives , cleaning , dinosaurs , kruft , old documentation