#74 precautions

I spent most of the weekend cleaning out my childhood home now that my mom has moved to a care facility.  There is so much that I could write about, but the one item that struck me is mothballs.

Do mothballs even exist anymore?  Apparently the cloth-eating buggers were prevalent in my mom's world -- or at least it was high on her list to prevent them.  I found boxes of (now absorbed) mothballs.  Mothball hangers.  Bars of soap designed to ward off the insects. Even special mothball-treated wax paper to line boxes.  Almost every box I opened had some preventative measure taken to ensure that the contents would be preserved.

I feel like mothballs are like one of those diseases that used to inflict everyone, but in today's world is eradicated.  I do not think of moths; have not taken preventative measures against them, and yet seem to be free of their destruction. 

In your organization, are you spending time/energy/resources on precautions that are no longer necessary?  Are you keeping manual copies when there is an electronic backup? Creating barriers to accessing information instead of making it freely available?  Just because someone always put mothballs in the box doesn't mean that you still need to.

-- beth triplett
leadershipdots.blogspot.com
@leadershipdots
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