The 21st Century Devil Comes With A Keyboard

Not to give too much away here, but I learned to type on a manual typewriter when I was in high school.  The television in our home was still operating off of a dial antenna, everybody still had album record players, and if you had an 8 track tape installed in your vehicle for easy music listening, man alive, you were in high cotton!

I held jobs all though high school and after, but my first “real” job in an office setting turned out to be quite the experience. In 1986 I worked as a customer service representative and my job was to take payments and enter applications on the computer.  That part of my job didn’t feel all that foreign I guess; but the fax machine, ah…that little dilly of a deal threw me for a loop! It took me several days to understand why the paper I kept feeding it, to go somewhere else, was coming back to me. In my mind, if it kept coming back, it never made it to where it was going. I would put it back in and send it again, and again. Until finally, someone who had received that paper about twenty times, called, and asked me to stop. That story is probably still being told somewhere by someone.

Now that everything we do seems to involve technology it shouldn’t seem like such a shock I guess. We have been moving towards this hard and fast for the past forty plus years. Telephones, cell phones, DVD players, Blu-Ray Players, Skype, and Face-Time.  With the highest grade cell phones and the picture programs that go with them, who needs a camera anymore? With the various social networks, you can see and talk to people you haven’t seen in forever and capture twenty missing years in one afternoon sitting.

But to have all of these things, you must make yourself vulnerable. You must allow your name, your “secret” password, your face, and other pertinent information be all but broadcast to the world. We are told of security’s set in place, but how real is that I ask you?

Three weeks ago my email account and my social network accounts were hacked within one week of each other. Some maniac wreaked havoc on all my email contacts and sent gosh awful things to all kinds of people. Not only that, but the hackers actually got into my computer and shut it down. I had to pay $200 to get it cleaned up and back on line.

As much as I ranted and raved during all of that, I could hear in the back of my mind, my Daddy telling me years and years ago, that all of this technology, this invasion of privacy, was not good and would catch up with us all one day. I am beginning to think my Daddy in all his infinite wisdom may have been right. There is a clan of tech savvy devil’s out there somewhere, stalking and planning an attack on your email or worse maybe even your back account.

P.S. If some genius could just create a one minute window to “snatch back” texts that are sent to the WRONG PERSON..now THAT is something worthy of creating.  Not that I know anything about that sort of thing.