Cleaning Out The Inbox

Uncle Bubba has filters on his email to avoid the avalanche, congestion, and deluge of that insidious spam. On a fluke he clicked on his trash folder and saw an unread email from a friend and later realized that within the body of his friend's email was a word that was in his spam filter. "How maddeningly inconvenient," he thought. But the entire affair provoked him to clean out his trash folder by double checking that he hadn't unknowingly missed others. Then he emptied his over stuffed spam folder; always a satisfying feeling. It was at that time that he noticed that he had about 3500 messages in his inbox. He click over to the oldest and they dated back to 2007. "Wow," he thought, "Really?" So he started cleaning out the inbox. He quickly scanned the sender and the subject line before deleting, but found it remarkable how he could quickly remember so many messages. Of course he didn't remember every detail, but he did recall the conversations. Unexpectedly, it was an uncomfortably nostalgic task. In the empathetic reminiscence of the conversations, he could bring to mind the hopes, the dreams and desires expressed and then just as quickly see the frequently disappointing aftermath in retrospect. He saw senders that he could not remember and others that have long since disappeared from the inbox and his thoughts. He knocked a few years off of the history books and whittled down maudlin messages by nearly two thousand. In Bubbie's view, this task is best completed efficiently without a lot of thought. Now if he could just do the same with his garage.