In happier times? Computer nostalgia is 10 PRINT "BOLLOCKS"
Memory wobblier than a Sinclair Rampack
Our Minister for Foreign Affairs has just had his smartphone hacked, which just goes to show that even moderately smart humans are doomed to make the same mistakes over and over again.
The story raises so many questions. One of which is whether France still has a Minister of Foreign Affairs, or indeed minister of anything at all given that our parliament has just done to Prime Minister Michel Barnier what Charlotte Corday did for Marat.
Barnier in a bath… Now there’s a figurative visual that’ll be difficult to wipe from your mind in a hurry.
Talking of wiping things from memory, I rather imagine that’s what the foreign affairs minister himself, Jean-Noël Barrot, is furiously doing right now. Apparently he has refused to hand over his handset to his own security services. We can only imagine what’s on it that he wants to keep to himself. And now you’re imagining what he’s trying to hide, you’ll be struggling to blank out even more unpleasant visuals from your brain for the rest of the day.
But let’s go back to my initial point: why do we never learn from past mistakes? The answer, surely, lies in the mischief that memory plays upon us. For example: “Data security used to be easy; these days, it’s difficult.”
What, and you actually believe that?
The music is reversible but time is not! Turn back! Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!
A good sign that you’ve reached middle age – apart from making mid-1970s ELO references – is when you discover a colleague’s date of birth and can remember exactly what you were doing on that day. (The sign of old age is almost the same, except that you can’t remember.)
And on that note, allow me to remind you that nostalgia is a fake… so much so, that much of what I write below has probably been written and published before. Quite possibly by me.
On my first day working at Metro – a free daily morning newspaper – in 2007, I was literally struck by a large whiteboard over the news sub-editors' desks. No, not figuratively, literally: it hadn't been fixed to the wall properly.
I took a photo of it. Here you go:
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