I am eternally grateful to my long-missed Dad for inculcating his young son with the importance of filing away letters; he kept every single letter that I wrote home during all my school, university and early professional life which gave me a definite leg-up as in recent years I started the process of putting my own memoir down on paper. I carried on that tradition as much as possible in view of the developing itinerant nature of my life, and it wasn’t until my life became intertwined with someone from my past who turned out to have a decidedly jealous and vindictive attitude towards me that a particular portion of that collection “mysteriously” disappeared. That incident apart, my belief in the strength and importance of maintaining a paper trail of one’s life remains as intransigent as ever.
It was with that thought in mind that I read about the recent failure of the American military to keep secrets under wraps when such secrets are transferred from paper filing systems that can very simply be effectively restricted to a carefully chosen few, into the ether that is the world of electronic and cloud storage that is increasingly becoming demonstrably flawed as a haven for information we would prefer to keep close to our chests. To discover that a very junior member of America’s armed forces, one who evidently has some considerable knowledge of IT, has been able to download secret documents, for which we assume he does not have security clearance, and then casually pass them on to a group of his buddies who have an interest in all things military, from playing games to collecting guns, is unbelievably scary.
A second, far more personal, incident that has just occurred in our home computing system is the accidental loss of all the e-mails that Safari/Google had stored in their archival systems of our two e-mail accounts. This was an “accident waiting to happen”, an oft-used term when I was investigating all sorts of industrial incidents during my pre-retirement work for UK’s Health and Safety Executive; that is all of the necessary elements for an unintended happening that would have undesirable results were present in the programming of the two mail applications. In the process of clearing unwanted e-mails that the system had stored under the heading “Archive”, one touch of the wrong button “All”, instantly despatched every single one of our e-mails into everlasting purgatory from which they can never return. The only person that can be blamed for the extreme nature of this sequence of events is the programme writer who failed to insert that simple little pop-up window that asks, “You are about to delete the entire contents of this file. Are you sure you want to continue with this action as it cannot be reversed?” a variation of which so many programmers, more sympathetic to the average home computer user’s skills, have deemed to be advisable.
And so dear readers, the sad but true lesson to be learned from both of these very sad but very true incidents is that we should tread with great care along any highway, street, road, country lane or grassy trail that may lull us into believing we are living in a world where our memories are safely stored in cloud heaven, when they are actually just fuel for the fires of hell and fodder for the taking of one and all.
Long live paper, pen and ink!!
PS: All the same, just commit this message to memory and please, don’t further damage the environment by printing it!
