I cleaned out some file drawers at the office this week.

We’re anticipating an office remodel and my staff has been badgering me to purge, purge, purge. I’m not comfortable admitting that I’ve turned into my mother in the way I tend to hang on to stuff. But it’s not like I’m a hoarder or anything! I’m not as bad as my mother and I would never be considered for the reality TV show.

I would more accurately describe my problem as sentimentalizing.

My employees would love to just clean out all the old stuff, but they’re smart enough to know better. They don’t understand that the stuff of unused and seemingly forgotten file drawers is not just useless old paper. It’s the stuff of memories.

My youngest employee was in diapers when I assumed ownership of CTP from the founder who had some crazy idea that I could actually succeed as a business woman. She was four when I first handled 200 prestigious trial attorneys to Hawaii for their annual conference. And she would have been of legal drinking age when I lost that client.

I’ve probably never told her the tale of how this group had – for 20 straight years – convened on the first Monday in November at a certain 5-star resort – where they would spend many thousands of dollars for green fees, spa services, retail therapy, accommodations, food and beverage (LOTS of beverages!) – and where this group expected to play their time-honored golf tournament on the first Wednesday in November . . . and how that 5-star resort screwed up and granted exclusive use of their championship golf course to a different group for our dates without notifying me before I signed the contract and began promoting the conference. Lawyers gotta find fault, and they blamed me for the hotel’s blunder. That was the last year we handled their account. (Nobody said business was fair – it was great while it lasted. And – truth be told, it was a challenge for me to suppress my innate creativity with that group who were perfectly content to return year after year to the same property and do nothing but golf, drink and sit on the beach.)

My aspiring young Program Manager would have been in 4th grade when I was sending faxes back and forth to destinations that we rarely propose any more: Australia, Cancun, Tahiti, Bali and Egypt – because they’re perceived as too far, too spoiled, too romantic, too hard to get to and/or too dangerous. And she’d have been just ten when we were requesting proposals from suppliers that don’t exist anymore:

• Temptress Cruises in Costa Rica (a tub of a ship that did a magical itinerary along the coast)
• A wildly creative DMC (destination management company) in Vancouver called Rare Indigo (did you catch it? “Rarin’ to go”) who connected me to one of the greatest entertainers on the planet, Andrew Johns who I’ve hired to play at my wedding, company anniversary parties, and at every possible opportunity for my client programs. (NOTE: He’s spectacular! Just hire him – and tell him I referred you!)
• Defunct airlines like Continental, Varig, Ansett, BWIA, Spanair, Avianca, TAP . . .

My young apprentice was graduating from high school the year that I did business with the most horrible client in the world – the one and only year that I did business with that horrible client. (NOTE: That’s another story for another blog.)

She probably can’t conceive of a time when there were no electronic files and everything needed to be saved and organized in paper folders.

Several red file folders with hand-written notes, published tariffs and thermal faxes turned yellow and glittery are evidence of countless hours and emotional energy we expended year after year after year for a certain LA radio station client – knowing he was jacking us around because he needed a second bid to keep the incumbent travel company honest. He assured us every single time, “Yes, you absolutely have a legitimate shot at my business.” We fell for this line every single time in hopes that one day, someday, the incumbent would stumble. And he eventually did. And when that happened, we had finally earned one of the most loyal clients in our company’s history and operated some incredible programs for him – without his ever seeking a competitive bid. But then he retired and his successor didn’t like the idea of incentive travel and it all stopped. (But it was great while it lasted!)

I assure you that I didn’t read everything before tossing, but I felt proud of how carefully we composed excruciatingly polite correspondence to our foreign suppliers, back in the day when correspondence was something more than today’s terse emails or truncated texts. And how melancholy I felt when scanning the multitude of rejection notices to those hard-working, hopeful suppliers when their destinations were not chosen – always adding am optimistic caveat: “We’ll save your proposal in the event we can submit to another client in the future…”

I felt guilty about all the trees that were felled to produce all the paper I threw away. I felt guilty for leaving six heavily-laden waste baskets for the nightly cleaning crew to dispose of. I felt guilty because our 1980-vintage office building doesn’t have the capacity for separate recycle bins.

I recognized the unique penmanship of employees who haven’t worked here in many years, and their particular ways of managing paper. There was The Stapler, The Paper-Clipper, and The Extreme Organizer who had file folders within file folders to sort contracts and correspondence from each hotel, DMC, airline, transportation company from which we solicited information and quotes.

Purged paperwork triggered memories of the history we enjoyed with certain clients. Like the jazz-format radio station from San Francisco that took their most important advertisers to world-famous jazz festivals: Montreux, Montreal, New Orleans and the final one that I escorted – to Rio de Janeiro, which was one of the most spectacular programs of my career. It truly was a grand finale . . . because shortly thereafter, the station was sold to a big media company who brought in their own management team and ceased to offer incentives any more.

I tossed unsold proposals for Cuba when travel there was still mostly forbidden, including one folder for the “Catholic Cuba Project,” of which I have no memory whatsoever.

I remembered doing a big purge back in 1988. 

I came to the office on a Saturday and tossed boxes and boxes of old program folders in the dumpster. One of the files was from an association conference we had successfully operated to New Zealand five years before. We had tried and tried to get the client to come back to us, but they were in bed with an agency from Portland and we finally gave up our attempts to win the business back.

So, was it a coincidence that just a few days later, I got a phone call from a guy who was on that New Zealand trip in 1983, explaining that he was the decision-maker for their 1989 conference . . . and, “Would you be interested in working together again?”

Of course I said “yes,” . . . after I had just thrown away all the historical data from our previous collaboration. (NOTE:  We still have that client!)

A perfect example, I suppose, of the adage about “clearing out the old to make way for the new.”

And if that’s true, I wonder which old client will contact me next week??

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