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Jay’s Literature Page
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| Last updated: 04 Apr 2005 |
(2001-2003)
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Your Biggest “Secrats”
Dear Mr. Author: As per your “dreams and aspirations”, your “future plans”, as you confided in your personal computer journal five years ago, at about this time you would have been living in a “comfortable yet not extremely overpriced dwelling near the commercial district”, a sane, level-headed, and mentally stable girlfriend, “for a change”, and a good job giving you a steady, continuous stream of well earned and deserved money each payday. As I do not know you all that well—in fact, I do not know you at all—I have no means to verify if any or all of these dreams have come true for you. Being an optimist, however, or simply one who in her heart desires that all things come true for everyone who wishes them, I will assume that they have. Let me then congratulate you before I go further in this letter. If there are any three indications of a successful young professional, those unmistakably are the three that I have enumerated above, and that you now as I fervently hope and wish possess them only attests to how high up in the Big Time you are. I am a fifth year student from the same university where you graduated, majoring in the same field as you did. (If hopefully nothing unfortunate happens, I’ll be graduating at the end of this semester. Please wish me luck. Ü) I also happen to be the president of the Student Society of our department. That I am now writing you this letter has very much to do with my responsibilities that come with my position. You see—as I’m sure you are aware of—we here at the Society recognize the challenges of the present, modern professional world outside of our school. Much as our university is molding us to become the competitive graduates that we should be, the Society is doing its part by helping the students get access to the latest computing tools actually used in the outside world. We recently had a fund raising project to help finance the upgrade of the computers we have at the study hall. Our primary concern was to meet the hardware requirements of the new tools we were planning to install on the machines. However, with the unprecedented, huge support our project received from the student body, not only were we able to buy the parts that we needed, we also had enough left to buy additional software to install, plus four brand new work stations and eight wall fans. We were in fact just Saturday before last cleaning up the study hall, preparing the machines for the upgrade, and backing up necessary files, when we found something we weren’t expecting in the hard disk of one of the computers. It was a directory that hadn’t been opened for at least five years, and was created a bit earlier than that. What made it so conspicuous was that though it was not hidden, either by having its attributes modified, or by placing it deep under a tree of directories, its name did not follow the standard folder naming convention being implemented in our college since four years ago. Moreover, the contents of the directory, once we tried inspecting them, were plain text files named as dates, and appeared to be journal entries of some kind. Indeed, when we opened the supposed journal files chosen at random, we saw that they were truly journal entry files—but not just any kind of journal entry files. They were somebody’s personal journal correspondence. The crueler ones among the officers were highly delighted to have discovered something personal like that. Already they wanted to make copies of their own to read, scrutinize, and laugh at at their own spare time. For what could possibly be more enjoyable than to do these things on matters written by a real person, with real emotions, in total confidence to the memory sectors of an electronic device? Fortunately I overheard their scheming, and immediately went into action. I made a decree prohibiting officers (elected or honorary) and their girlfriends or boyfriends (acquired either before or after being installed in their positions) from copying anything from the disks that were supposed to be cleaned up. This of course received moans of protests from everyone—but there was nothing they could really do. I was the president, and Student Society presidents are known to have the misfortune of making decisions not necessarily to the liking of the general population, yet are nonetheless for the greater good¹. Another official decision I made on the same day was what to do with the journal entries we had found. Were they to be deleted as we did mostly school report documents and obscene photographs left by the students in our machines? Or were they to be backed-up, being regarded as important college property? One question we had to answer first was how those files came to be written in our machine’s hard disk in the first place. The easiest answer was that a user must have simply typed them there. This, however, was unlikely. The very thing that afforded whoever the author was to write in one of our machines made it unlikely that he or she could have saved it in that work station alone. It was improbable that in all the events that he/she wrote the journal entries, it was on that particular machine. There must have been a time when that particular station was unavailable, meaning, was being used by someone else, and the author had to write using another machine. How come no similar entries were found in the other machines? It would have been possible to save files on one location using different work stations if we were in a network. Unfortunately, though—even as our college is bound produce and send forth to the world hundreds of potentially brilliant computer network engineers come graduation time—we aren’t using a network in the study hall. One possibility was that those files were copied there. Five years ago. We looked back on how the Student Society study hall was five years ago. Most of the officers in my year level were still freshmen by then. We remembered the study hall—S.S. Center it was still called back then—as the place where we could work on our assignments during vacant periods. It was also a good place to hang out when there was nothing to do and/or the professor still hadn’t arrived. Some joked that the S.S. center was also a good place to get (or trade in) a girl- or a boyfriend, in case anyone wanted one, but of course I just laughed and never believed that. (FYI, I’m five months S.S. president and still very much single.) More than those things, we remembered the S.S. center five years ago as the place where we could have free computer use, provided there were any available machines. In fact, as Student Society history has it, it was that year that S.S. center started servicing to the need of the students for free computer use. Prior to this, students had to rent from computer shops outside the school, which, with all the possible dangers of infection associated with it, cost the students money. Five years ago. Most of the stuff in the study hall now were acquired five years ago: the computers, the tables, the chairs, the surviving wall fans. Most significant of all, the last update of the personal journal entries we found in one of the computers was also five years ago! Could it have been possible, then, that the author of the journal entries was one of the very first users of the S.S. Center computers? Could that directory-load of files have been copied into the hard disk on a time when guidelines on storage space utilization, even file naming convention for common users, haven’t yet been thought of? With the standards and restrictions still undefined, it was not improbable that anyone could have just copied, disk to disk, anything he/she wishes to. The next logical question to ask was: who could the author be? To provide us with a solid enough answer, we had to skim through the journal entries for an introduction or any explicit mention of the author’s name. And that’s how we found that it was you. I’m writing you now, after having checked old college records, and using my considerable network of acquaintances for your contact information, to let you know that if we receive no response from you telling us otherwise, we shall be deleting all your files in our hard disk within the next two school days. That, and the fact that since discovering your journal files in our disk, the entire college now practically knows all your biggest secrets.
Yours very truly, ________________________ ¹ A very popular case is this one of an S.S. president who nearly got involved in a fist fight in implementing a not-so popular yet proper field trip bus loading scheme. |
| © 2005 Jay Santos |