Sunday 4 March 2007

One of those days

Would have been posted yesterday if Tom's useless system hadn't been playing up:

I was walking home this morning and I was being followed by a strange man.

Just to make sure you understand context this was not staggering home in the early hours a little the worse for wear having drunk myself into a stupor. No this was about 11:00 o'clock this morning and the man was just strange looking.

He was however wielding a shovel. When I say wielding, he was probably carrying it in such a way that the weight was distributed evenly to avoid back problems, but the shovel part was uppermost.

I knew I was being followed and looked round to see who was behind me. When I saw Mr Strange, who just had an unusual appearance (looked like a cross between the two Ronnies), my reaction was to wonder if he planned to shovel me to death and then use the shovel to dig a hole to bury the body.

Clearly he didn't, but why did I think that?

Anyway it didn't stop there. My thoughts continued towards the 'what happens when I'm dead' and let's assume I was just dead, and not buried. How would anyone know who to invite to the funeral? Well in my experience people rely on the good old fashioned address book of the deceased. Well that simply won't work in the future.

How many people have dispensed with paper and pen and use e-mail contacts to store people's address information? We don't write phone numbers down anymore, they get stored on SIM cards.

How long would this site have to be untouched before you'd start to think 'Oooh, maybe she's popped her clogs?'

What happens to the blogs of the dead? Do they stay there forever? Are e-mail addresses immortal? Now I've got my hands on a Hotmail account is that it forever? Can nobody else own that address even after I've been incinerated?

1 comment:

Ann Cardus said...

Darryl


"looked like a cross between the two Ronnies?" The mind boggles!

Bizarrely, I've wondered the same thing about how my friends on here might find out what has happened to me if anything did. I hope nothing does, but it did occur to me...

As for Hotmail, no, your account would be eventually made available. All your details get deleted off if you don't use your account for something like 30 days, and after some other period of time, if someone wanted to use your email address they would just have to try and register it in the normal way, and eventually it would work.


Posted by Darryl On Sunday, March 04, 2007 at 3:29 PM
[Remove] [Reply to this]



Barbara

I still have a paper and pen filofax thingy, mostly for making notes but I do use the address book and I have a page of "in case of emergency" phone numbers and emails. If there is ever a case of emergency I pity the poor sod who finds all those contacts to contact. Maybe I need to leave MySpace emergency instructions?

A friend of my friend Tom died and although his MySpace page was deleted his photo is still stored somewhere on the server and is still on Tom's friend list. A ghost in the machine?



Posted by Barbara On Sunday, March 04, 2007 at 8:17 PM
[Remove] [Reply to this]



Ann


You see I haven't shared my MySpace login with anyone. So how could anyone log in as me to delete it?

Do MySpace admin delete an account based on inactivity or on instruction, and do they require proof?

Dave asked me if my Blogger blogs will stay there forever. I said "I guess so."


Posted by Ann On Sunday, March 04, 2007 at 10:17 PM
[Remove] [Reply to this]