Oblivion of DELETE

I just got a new phone. A cell phone, that is. It’s not really a brand new from-the-box phone but a rather a swap.

So, of course, what happens with a new phone is that you have to take all your old stuff and move it to the new one. I know it makes for more work later, but I like to keep my information on the phone itself rather than the SIM card. There are so many more options than what the SIM card gives you (such as storing birthdays, addresses, etc). And you can set whether the primary number is the cell phone or the house phone for that particular contact. Unfortunately, once you move all that information into your SIM, everything gets reshuffled.

So as I have to sort through this hodge podge that will make this phone my phone, I inevitably have to do some memory cleaning. Question is, what do I keep or don’t keep? People I used to work with, companies I no longer work for, teachers and professors, family members I never talk to, people I have ceased to know… who do I keep from or chuck into the oblivion that is DELETE?

Don’t get me wrong, as people that know me know that I’m certainly not a sentimentalist. If I don’t talk to you, I usually chuck you from my list. I’m not one of those college kids that accumulates phone numbers just to make their cell phone address book an endless abyss of faceless names and digits. Some of these numbers I have kept because I think they might come in handy. Like.. if I decide to fill out an employment application and need my old employer’s number (even though I know it no longer works). Or who knows.. keeping that professor’s number if I ever need a favor, you never know. But that’s the problem:  you never know. So how long is too long to keep a number in your address book that might just have gone out of existence (or been recycled to a new owner) while you were guarding it in your phone’s memory?

Every time I see these names, I either don’t recognize the entry, “Who the heck is Sam?!” (and believe you me, usually it is very common names that I don’t recognize) or I’m reminded how I no longer talk to these people. Whether or not it’s a good decision, I don’t know. But I think I just convinced myself to wipe all those numbers.