Digital baggage

Verizon wireless has this really awful data policy, whereby I can only keep so many text messages on my phone – why, I just can’t imagine.  I have storage capabilities on my phone – but it doesn’t allow me to transfer the text messages to this storage.  Additionally, they retire voicemails after only so long – the only way to keep them is to wait for the messages to expire, at which point you can opt to save them for an additional 45 days.

This may beg the question why am I holding onto these messages?  Well there are a few reasons.  The most obvious is that I need to reference the message in the future – it’s a convenient way to carry around information – as I almost always have my cell phone with me.  But there are other, more sentimental reasons as well.  And Verizon should know this.  So why then can’t I opt to store this data off of their servers, on a data store that allows me to eventually transfer it onto my PC?

Without this capability, I’m eventually going to lose this data – either intentionally by deleting it myself (to make room for new text messages) or inadvertently (by not re-saving the voicemail messages).  And while this makes me angry –  because I’m driven to do it by a weakness in their systems – there’s a part of me that looks forward to clearing these things out.

As I’ve spent the last few days helping Meghan pack up and move out of her house, I’m amazed at the amount of stuff that she has, which makes me thing immediately of all of the stuff that I have.  And moving is the perfect time to clean house, and get rid of all of the excess baggage – and there’s something very cathartic about that process.  Perhaps the same is true of digital information.  As I look across my digital domain – at all of the stuff that I’ve accumulated.. perhaps it’s not bad for a little digital house cleaning from time to time..  I wonder if all of the digital stuff weighs one down as much as the physical stuff though?

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