Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Haverhill today (pronounced ‘averell’, if you’re a local). What a depressing town, no wonder they only charge 10p per hour for parking, surely that can’t cover the maintence cost of the meters? There was a market on, but it mostly sold cheap fake electrical goods, there was only one food stall I saw and they were desperately trying to shift their potatoes and apples. They stocked nothing else. How does a town like that support two computer shops?

I got back to discover a missed call from Magrathea (near wokingham) in my voip recent calls list – no idea how long its been there, but if you recognise that as a call attempt you made, you got the right number…leave an answerphone message next time.

I’ve been feeling a bit mortal lately, I think perhaps I shouldn’t eat toad-in-the-hole so soon before bedtime. But it made me wonder whether other people plan for death? I don’t mean in a suicide kind of way (although if you would like to talk about that I’d like to hear about it…comments screened just in case), rather ordered, having notes on everything that would need to be sorted. It occurred to me that actually my life is a whirlwind of incomplete paperwork at the best of times, and that if I wasn’t at the centre of it trying to juggle those overdue forms things would go fairly seriously awry, of course that wouldn’t be too much of an issue for me since I’d have more pressing matters to deal with in those circumstances.

The closest I got was my planning to move to Tokyo – in some ways I was planning that as a suicide, as a way to drop out of my responsibilities in the UK, in such a way that I didn’t have to actually face dying. Just more of my avoidant personality, I suppose. Maybe I should create a document, or a shell script, or something, that could be used after I pass away to help everything get sorted out. But is that tempting fate?

(this post has been brought to you thanks to ironing and 24 hour party people – not a combination I recommend, top film though)


Categories: Memories.

/ 7 Comments

7 comments

  1. strange_complex

    Something that’s occurred to me about death in the 21st century world is the issue of passwords. We all have a plethora of them these days, from highly sensitive things like bank accounts, to mattes as simple as actually getting on to some computers.

    If I died right now, I’d actually rather want somebody to get onto my email account, live journal and so on, to wrap things up and let people know I wasn’t around any more. I’d also want people to be able to sort out my financial affairs properly. But all of this would be rather hard without the right passwords.

    I’m not entirely sure what the solution is to all this, but if / when I get around to writing a will, I might well include information about my most important passwords in it, to be made available to my executors on the event of my death.

    Reply
    • neilh

      Yes, thats the kind of thing I was worrying about. But you change your passwords on a regular basis, don’t you? And you would want anyone to have access to them until after they’re no use to you any more. So they don’t really live in a will, though maybe they live in a place that you have access to that is described in the will.

      Reply
      • strange_complex

        Oh, yes – I suppose what I really meant about having my ‘most important passwords’ in my will is that they’d be the ones that gave access to everything else. As long as they didn’t change, I could change the information in the documents they were protecting.

        By the way, go here, get the contact information of your choice, and use it to let me know your land address so I can send you a paper invitation to my partay!!!.

        Reply
  2. neilh

    I was thinking more about the practicalities of ‘this is the password to my computer, this is where I hid the millions I stole, this is the evidence that needs deleting….’, I suppose some of that could be covered in a will, but some of it isn’t really right for that….I was wondering about a kind-of uninstall script for me.

    I’m not sure I really care what anyone feels about it, they’re just gonna have to live with it.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.