I have done a big move across country twice. First, I moved from Jersey to South Carolina. About 6 years after that, I moved from South Carolina to Seattle. And now, I am planning to move from Seattle to North Carolina. If there’s one thing I can say about moving, it’s this:
I hate it.
Now, I don’t actually mind going to a new place. Change can be good. In my case, since I utterly despise the Seattle weather most of the year, and I dislike the area in other ways (the traffic is completely vile at all times of day), I am looking forward ultimately to living in North Carolina instead. I can’t wait to get away from the Pacific Northwest. Living in a new place, is fine.
However, the act of moving is just not pleasant at all. There is the search for movers, and the hassle of dealing with agents and getting estimates. Then there is the “bamboo shoots being shoved up my fingernails” experience of going through every single object I own, and making that decision: do I want it enough to pay to have it shipped across country? Am I even going to conceivably ever use this again? And why the hell did I pay to move this the last time, and the time before that?
Part of the problem is that I have too much clutter. I am not a super-pack-rat the way some folks are, but I do tend to keep things around “just in case I need them” — which I mostly never do. Today, for example, I found reams and reams of paper worth of old printouts, grading sheets, and so forth from classes for which I was the teaching assistant (TA) at least 10, in some cases 15, years ago. Surely I do not need to still keep these old things. However, I could not just throw them out. You see, foolishly (and annoyingly to someone like me, who likes to learn the name of every student), colleges and universities use people’s Social Security Number (SSN) as their identification in school. That means every single computer print out, grade sheet, etc, that I have from the schools at which I taught, holds dozens of SSNs. I don’t want these to fall into the wrong hands, as those poor students could then have their ID stolen. So, I had to go through every page of every folder, and take out anything with an SSN (or what might be part of an SSN) on it, and send that to the shredder. This ended up taking me 2 hours instead of the 2 minutes it would take to just throw it away. I might be a bit paranoid, but my guess is those students would rather have their SSNs shredded than just thrown in the dumpster out behind my apartment.
All told, after two hours today, I packed up one box of old papers that I just can’t really part with (most of these are xeroxes of journal articles I read 10 or more years ago and never have since, but, since I make notes on them when I read them, what I’m doing is keeping my notes, rather than the articles), and threw out three brown paper shopping bags of junk I just am not going to bother moving. Some of it is old data from papers long ago published. It’s possible someone might want to see the data, but, too bad. (I have all the raw data either in lab books or on video tapes if I really need it.) Supposedly in science you are supposed to keep your data forever, but… when the journal editors start paying for my moving expenses, maybe then I will decide to keep everything, forever. I do, of course, keep whatever I think I will likely need… I just toss what I don’t imagine ever needing. And I never throw out old lab notebooks. Fortunately I only have about six of those.
What I resent perhaps most of all is the time this all takes, and even worse, the brain cells I now have to invest in learning things like “moving terminology” and figuring out which of the forthcoming estimates of time/expense to go with. Just a few minutes ago, I had to make a new bookmark folder in my browser, and bookmark the websites for three moving companies that I am starting with in terms of getting estimates. I really wish I didn’t have to devote energy to that but… oh well.
Since the position I am entering is a tenure-track one, and since I am hoping to get tenure, maybe I will get lucky, and this will be the last major move I will have to endure. But somehow, I doubt it. I seem destined to move about once every 7 years, like getting a “7 year itch.”
The one good thing that comes of it is, I will get rid of a lot of junk I didn’t really need in the first place.
I am both elated at finding someone who actually cares enough to take the time to protect others from identity theft in this manner, and appalled to realize how many people in your position almost certainly don’t do the same–and the potential ramifications this could have. I hope some schools are starting to learn not to use SSNs as IDs, but I imagine that isn’t the case.
Good luck with your move; moving is a horrid thing. I just moved to Maryland three years ago, and I’m still not eager to repeat the experience any time soon.
I don’t know if all schools still do, but as of 2004 most schools still were. They think nothing of using SSN as student ID.
I remember when I was an undergrad, now going on 20 years ago, each school had its own student number/ID system. Then in the 90s they all got lazy and started using SSN as your student number. Because grades used to be posted on the wall outside most classrooms at the end of term, this led to people’s social security numbers being posted on the wall in public view. That more IDs were not stolen is nothing shy of a miracle.
At most schools it’s now against the rules to post SSNs and in many cases you can’t even post grades in any fashion, including by assigning random numbers to students. These days since you can just e-mail a student his grade, there is no need for it.
Schools are getting a bit better at it but they still try and be lazy about the number itself… hopefully they will go back to their own numbering systems soon. It would be much safer.