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Some time ago, a guy in the office below mine went out for lunch leaving one of those old electric heaters on. My office was on the 3rd floor (4th for you Americans). 14 fire engines went through the windows of my office, to fight the fire and thus saving the building from total destruction. They were so good that only my office was totally destroyed, although there were extensive damages to the structure. I had many years of books, papers, documents accumulated in that room, plus computers, hard disks, magnetic tapes, floppy disks, cassettes, ... Practically the accumulation of a whole carrier, things that had crossed oceans, plus all those personal things. A broken wood baseball bat, signed Duke Snider, that I kept there just in case ... That day I was up in the mountains skiing, and I did not rush back when they called me. Actually when I saw the ruins, I felt as somebody had lifted tens of years of alluvial deposit from my back. Finally I was free from my past. If somebody asked me about a project left unfinished, I lifted just one eyebrow: gone, for good. Freedom. A new life. Excuses for all sort of negligences, lazinesses. Joy, lightness of spirit. Hardly conquered, hotly conquered, and never lost again. Plus the load of pressure and resentments that i could have poured on the people that had caused that, which I never did, but just the idea of it gave me breathing room wherever I went for some time. The whole building stayed closed for a while. The day after the event I had a meeting with my guys in the street, under a light rain, taking notes with a pencil. They gave me a special telephone number (it was before the little things of nowadays) and I run my affairs with that, with a pencil and a piece of paper for a bit. Than they fixed things and that was the end of the good times and I had to go back to the old salt mine.
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