The nature of my game

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
From Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones

So, I guess it’s time someone came clean about all this. You wanted to watch cat videos to your heart’s content, hiding anonymously behind a computer screen, didn’t you? Did you think there was such a thing as a free lunch? No sireebeelzebub. And now its time to pay for it.

Yes, it was me who introduced the internet. And it was me who got you hooked on it—just deploying that old human failing called the need for instant gratification. Me who convinced all the world’s major financial institutuions that it was the way of the future to use it. And me, of course, who introduced the Heartbleed virus.

So, while you may think that the price of being able to buy tickets to a Justin Bieber concert from your mobile phone is just the fact that some undernourished hacker from Bulgaria stole all your account information from under your nose and is withdrawing your life savings while we, or rather I, speak; please give credit where credit is due. Go out and buy yourself an ‘I Love Lucy’ T-shirt, at the very least.

And do you think that you can solve the problem by changing your passwords? Hah! Most of you can’t even remember where you wrote your passwords down, if you ever wrote them down to begin with. And the secret questions that you might have to resort to instead? Don’t you realize that I already know the name of your cat, your grade two teacher and your mother’s childhood best friend? Go ahead and change your password if you want: I’m already lurking inside your computer, just taking notes while you sweat to come up with something original. By the way, you might as well use ABC123. I’ve already figured out who is using UHV&549HGC, so I can’t see the point in being complex.

Oh, before I forget, I liked those pictures of the holiday you took in the Dominican Republic that you sent to your sister yesterday. Good idea of you to work on your heat resistance, if you get my meaning. And the name of the song you were trying to find on YouTube yesterday was Devil in Disguise: Elvis sang it and it hit number three on the Billboard charts, but he didn’t write it. You’re welcome.

I suppose I should take this opportunity to tell you a few of the many other projects I’ve got underway at the moment. I won’t bother with the war and pestilence stuff, although that’s going gangbusters; but then again, it always does and it’s been around for a long, long time. I’ll just focus on some of the newer ones.

I’m quite proud of the handwritten letter pricing initiative. I’ve been working with the people at Canada Post to make the price of snail mail so prohibitive no one will send anyone else a handwritten missive anymore. It will all go through my hands on the computer instead. In conjunction with my early learning project, which is intended to wean elementary students off cursive writing completely, I figure that in another 10 or 15 years, no one will know how to use the postal system anyway.

The income tax e-filing opportunity, you’ve probably already realized, was one of mine too. The plan is that by next year (although there may be a few delays, given that Heartbleed was never supposed to be made public), filing a paper tax return will be outlawed. Everything will go through an online system that is ‘secure.’ (Excuse me while I giggle). I just have to say how pleased I am to be working with a government that likes cutting costs above everything else: it makes my job so much easier. Just look how well it worked with those veterans’ offices earlier this year.

I also expect that in a few months, my print newspaper elimination campaign will have borne fruit, so that everyone (okay: we’ll make an exception for the Times) will have to get their news through the internet. And I’ve already got music and entertainment locked up. Thanks, iTunes; thanks, Netflix.

I guess I’ve told you enough to figure out the nature of my game. You might as well sit back and watch a few more cat videos before I clean you out. You should have heeded the warning from the Rolling Stones. But you never showed me any sympathy, so why should I reciprocate?

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca