EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
KID
QUIPS
During last July’s 5.8 earthquake, 3-year-old Bronwyn told her 1-year-old sister, “We’re going for a wiggle.” READ MORE
Mother Knows Best
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Personal computers are closet organizers for our lives. Just as homebuilders now design floor plans to accommodate today's double-income, telecommuting, multi-hyphenated lifestyles, software programs provide the means to manage them. We use our PCs for everything from calendar notes to correspondence. Even the financial statements, personal journals and family photos formerly stored in shoeboxes under the bed are now housed in our cyber homes. Problem is, mine's a mess. Take, for example, my PC's desktop. It used to have just a few carefully placed icons on it and, like a model home void of any backpacks or gym clothes strewn about, it projected a neat and tidy image. Now our computer has that "lived-in" look. Post-It notes frame the monitor, which is cluttered with icons I can't even identify, dropped there like socks on the family room floor by the rest of my family. Word documents should be filed in data folders, just like my sweaters should be stacked on closet shelves. Instead, resembling the scattered placement of files on my hard drive, my sweaters can be found all over - some on shelves, some on hangers, and sadly, some resting atop my stack of shoes. To find the one I want to wear requires searching. Same with my documents. Was it a Word doc or a Works doc?, I try to recall. Did I create that in MS Publisher or was it WordPad? Consider the digital photo issue. When my kids need a picture, say for a family poster project at school, I swear I can find it faster by rifling through the shoebox of unlabeled Costco photo envelops than by trying to remember the name I assigned to it when I filed it digitally. Was it "boysbaseball.jpg" or "bzbb.bmp?" Even the stuff I download from websites can be misplaced, dropped into what my computer calls "temporary Internet files," which I can never seem to locate. I'm thinking we need a home with more square footage AND a computer with a bigger hard drive. Of course, if I were more organized, I'd make time to compress my data files and delete all the junk I'm storing both on my hard drive and in my home. We'd probably have all the extra space we need. And that little recycle bin icon? Like the kitchen trash can, it gets emptied only after nagging my family to go through it to make sure we didn't delete a homework assignment. For us, it serves as a backup filing system. So I'm thinking there's a huge business opportunity here - a cyber cleaning service. You know, someone to sweep up after a busy day online. She'd properly label and file my documents, delete my temporary Internet files, empty the recycle bin and compress my data files. While she's doing all that, maybe I'll start on my closet. Kimberly A. Porrazzo of Lake Forest is a senior writer for Churm Publishing, Inc. She can be reached at: kimberlyporrazzo@cox.net. |
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