Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

My assistant, Kyle, hasn’t emptied his trash for ten years. Not that kind of trash; I mean the trash folder on his computer.

I was surprised when he revealed this as we worked on my web site last week. I’m a rather compulsive person for tossing things out; and I admit that it’s come back to haunt me a time or two. In both my paper and virtual file worlds.

But ten years, Kyle?

“The trash takes up almost no space on the hard drive,” my computer-literate companion explained. “And I’m concerned I might want to reference something later. It’s happened a couple times already.

“Once I asked a question of a professor via email. The same question came up a couple years after, and I had the old email to refer to. I also got into a dispute with an Internet provider about service. They disagreed with me, but I had a record of the day I signed up, every time I’d contacted the technical service, and what transpired.”

My problem is I have taken the word trash literally. Trash is to be thrown out, its use having been exhausted. Trash is something that is no longer necessary to keep around.

But in the computer world, this isn’t really the case. What passes for trash, or what Word calls recycling, is more like the hard copy letters, proposals, and responses I kept when everything went into folders in black metal file cabinets. One hospital I worked at kept its most current three years in its Medical Records Department, and anything before that was relegated to the basement catacombs next to the morgue.

In the future I’ll be less eager to empty my computer trash folder, but I do think manufacturers should call it something different. How about Reference Desk?