WHAT THE HELL IS THE ARCHIVE, ANYWAY? A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

At the start of each year I attempt to put my archive in order. We’ll define the start of each year as The Entirety of January. I put my archive in order at other points throughout the year, but this business in January seems more final.
   It’s not quite the start of something. Rather, it’s about putting the previous year’s archive to bed. Except, of course, I am sitting here asking myself…just exactly what the hell is the archive, anyway? It’s this bit of information, and that file, and those things over there behind the low clouds. Don’t forget the entire landscape ahead.
   The archive isn’t exactly annual. But there are annual features to it. The archive isn’t entirely electronic. There’s paper aplenty in this so-called paperless office. I only have to glare at the stockpile of ink boxes for the printer to understand that.
   My paper archive is, for the most part, organised and not chaotic. (It is chaotic.) Regular correspondence is arranged in boxes by individual. Years of correspondence in the one place. Letters. Cards. Oddments. Official correspondence is saved up in boxes, too.
   The official material is a collection of fossils. Paperwork. You need it. Don’t think you don’t. There’ll be a query half a decade down the line, and you’ll be thankful that you held on (by your fingernails) to the piece of paper that saves your clichéd bacon.
   Offers to “go paperless” are treated with suspicion. Certain government departments insist on paper, to this day. And I’m thankful that I can, on occasion, wave an original document in the stern faces of those who disbelieve they’ve made an error at their end.
   I make very little effort to put my paper archive in order each year. There’s not much paper coming in. What arrives is vital. It is stored in the time-honoured fashion. The system works. In some cases, evidence is corroborated by the existence of electronic documents.
   There’s the business of shredding. Certain documents don’t outlive the hour in which they flop through my letterbox. Others are kept for years. There is a clearout once in a blue moon. I am very careful about the things I shred. So far, I’ve not shredded the wrong document. Keep your shredder in a separate room from the office housing the paperwork.
   My shredder is on a separate floor. I have to make the pilgrimage to mince a document.
   Inside the electronic archive, I store all sorts of nonsense. I tend to store things by the year. Though there are items outwith annual storage. Pillars of the Ancients, that stand separate from the Great Library of Electronica, mark eternity unchanged by the sands of time.
   What am I talking about? I mean the files that let me set up the annual archiving process in the first place. There’s a folder on monthly entries with sub-folders marking out the months of the year. Every January, I create my new annual archive based on that monthly folder.
   It sits outside the annual scheme of things, but it serves as the backbone for so many annual categories. People come and go. I create a folder for people every year, and I build entries based on whoever turns up in the correspondence.
   The moment someone contacts me over business or personal stuff, that person receives a named folder. I’ll drop the monthly folder into that archive entry. Then I can check to see who said what and roughly when, going by so-and-so in the people folder for the year blah-de-blah. That person contacted me in January. The other person conducted business with me in March and April.
   Seeing to my archive every January isn’t about finality. No, there’s the fresh annual archive to set up. There are other organisational files sitting there, waiting to go. Construction of a new wing of the Great Library of Electronica is swift.
   All the basics are up and running in January. Yes, it took time to set up the system I use now. That’s why it takes hardly any time to create a new annual framework on or around the 1^st of January. Yes, occasionally I jump the gun and create next year’s files ahead of time. Depends how busy things get, as one year makes way for another.
   Construction of the new is easy. Preservation of the old should also be easy. Quick. Think not these thoughts. They’ll do you no good. I have copies of copies. And that can be a problem. Duplication of effort.
   But is the duplicate an exact duplicate? The paper archive is smaller, and, though tedious to explore, is easy enough to explore. Electronic folders multiply in the dark, mushrooming, and their purpose is to deceive.
   Yes, I really must take a digital flamethrower to the electronic side of things. What is important? Where are the relevant files? What became more important? Is anything redundant? Are certain files no longer usable? What arcane sorcery must I perform, just to be able to open and read an old piece of data? How many files fell to corruption without notice?
   And I speak only of the computer.
   The archive’s tendrils extend into e-mail and more. Every tendril is a burst of energy provided by coffee while I typed on a rainy night. Paperwork. Computer data. Internet files. Miniature space-time maps of me, and of organisations interacting with me. People. Places. Things. This glitch. That gremlin.
   Errors corrected and terrors deflected. Hilarious things that can never be explained as funny. Not only did you have to be there, but also…you had to be there for those seven minutes. What is the archive?
   It’s me. And not me. Hell, it’s my biting response to spam e-mail in a mock-rant on The Twitter. My archive is a portrait of the interwebs. The information super-country-lane. And that stack of paper in the room across the way. Also, the stack out of sight behind the first stack.
   I reorganised everything. And now another year trundles in. I must reorganise all over again. The archive is also my copy of the archive. At least, in electronic terms. So it is that dark plasticky box, storing information in reserve. An external drive.
   And there’s cloud storage on the interwebs as well.
   Don’t forget my reserve computer. If this one fails, I have a very slow emergency machine to lean on. It’s similar to flying on no engines and a hefty dollop of wishful thinking dished out in a slow treacly manner.
   But what is the archive, really?
   Preparing to set down another layer of it, to handle the next year’s files, I can say – with no fear – that the archive is a steaming disorganised mess. Just the annual tax files alone. My flamethrower is hissing and sparking at the ready.
   Every year, I think I fix this as I put an archive layer to bed. And every year I go out of my way to stir the spaghetti into deep unsolvable tangles. By the time I post this blog, I’ll have finally deleted stuff that’s no longer required. (Dream on.)
   I believe much of that was never required in the first place. Do I revisit the archive? Can I make use of those files of old? Yes. That’s the point of the archive, after all. To make use of stuff that’s sitting there waiting for the call.
   Yes, I’ve faced the accusation that I am organised. But my own better organisation gets in the way of my own disastrous organisation, giving the mere illusion of a tidy office. Beneath the surface, there isn’t even a concept of anything being beneath the surface.
   And so…
   This time, I really look at the paper archive. As there’s not much lying around, this should truly be easy to navigate. Except, with a slow dawning sense of ultimate terror, I realise I am once again talking utter bullshit about my archives.
   The official files in see-through plastic boxes are (more or less) okay. Yes, they are in a bit of a jumble. But that jumble is self-contained. There’s a plastic vault holding the forces of chaos at bay.
   However, there’s another category…
   Once upon a time, long ago and far away, over seven hills and seven woods and seven streams, in the land of fucking make-believe, I stored stacks of paperwork on shelves. This was a straightforward system, before the days of see-through boxes.
   I should’ve gone directly to see-through boxes.
   This year, more space is given over to books and to boxes of boardgames and roleplaying game supplements for the video channel. What can I cut? Time to weed out useless pieces of paper in the stacks.
   Why did I never transfer the stacks to see-through boxes? The stacks are less official. Doesn’t make them less important. If I must locate an official document, I head to my see-through boxes.
   So what happened in January this year? That pressure, to investigate small inconsequential stacks, headed into the red zone of the steam dial. And I was aghast. Shocked. Dismayed. Lots of words like those.
   Small stacks of paper. They are hellish to go through. Hellish, only more so. Densely-packed fossil records glare back at me. I’ve allowed this stuff to grow disorganised in a peaceful manner.
   Back to the coal-face it is. I chip away at the layers, knowing that each small separate stack will consume hours (if not days) of my life. My archive seems organised. Yes. It seems so. Seeming is believing. I disbelieve that. This is death by a thousand paper-cuts.
   The good news is…that I only have to tackle this paper archive once. I have yet to shred the wrong document. It’s also true to say that I have yet to shred a load of right documents that have had this coming to them for a very long time.
   Nurse, the smelling-salts. And a large coffee.