It’s peak panic season. The scammers out in droves and the world is volatile, wars, plagues and pestilence. All those biblical forewarnings that suggest the end is nigh. For some, at least.
Whenever a hacker gets inside my computer or I get a whiff of their approach, I panic. To think of an infection invading the sacred space of my writing world fills me with terror. Makes my heart race.
If only I had a greater understanding of how these things work, I might be less inclined to panic but I am of the generation for whom computers first entered the realms of science fiction, a thing of the future which might never materialise in our lifetime.
But materialise they have and with a vengeance.
I can remember the days before mobile phones and email, how after you left your house, unless you called from a phone box somewhere, or had a pager within an institution, you were unable to connect to those you left behind.
I remember an evening at dinner in a restaurant when one of our group of friends, Henry Ekselman, ever the entrepreneur, produced a brick-shaped contraption. Heavy to hold. A mobile telephone, he told us, and we could use it to ring anyone anywhere.
In the warm, loud restaurant somewhere in St Kilda, several people experimented, but I only had courage enough to feel its weight in my hands. The hefty lump of technology, doubting it would ever become the thing it has today.
Likewise, I remember another first encounter with another friend, this time from Canberra, Tony Branigan, who moved here to Melbourne with his new partner. One afternoon as we waited for the kettle to boil, Tony offered us a demonstration of their new contraption, a microwave.
Voila, and to my initial disbelief, Tony reheated some rice from the fridge, cold to steaming hot in two minutes. Again, I could not believe my eyes.
The world was steaming ahead at such a rate it felt I could never keep up. Today, I am as attached to my phone and computer as the next person. But in the early days of computers, I disregarded them, preferring to write by hand and using snail mail for correspondence. Until one day in my early thirties, after my professional association appointed me as secretary, I realised I would need to learn to type, albeit with two or three fingers – as I still type today – on our one family computer. The one my husband bought for his work and study.
It sat in a corner of our kitchen. I can see him still, beavering away at a legal assignment while our children were small and not much interested in computers. They preferred the television.
This changed over time to the point they each needed a computer of their own after competition for the family computer avalanched.
My grandchildren are quick to master the keyboard and mouse from early days. Even as toddlers they know how to get into Netflix and Disney Plus and to work their way around a screen.
When the hackers visit my computer I’m inclined to call on one of my sons in law. One who makes his living inside the bodies of other people’s computers. He programs the stuff that goes into them. He knows how they work, and trouble shoots anything that goes awry. Amazing to watch him behind the scenes in the land of what to me is the gibberish of computer code. I’m one of the fortunate ones with help on tap.
Again, in the earlier days when our children were too small to know much more about computers than us, we called on professional help from New Waves Systems, a technician who spent his life visiting other people’s houses to help them solve their computer problems.
The call for passwords first began for us in the 1990s at Video Easy. When my husband hot footed it down to the new store on the corner of Riversdale and Burke Roads to order a Saturday night video, which we might watch as a family. To sign up he needed a password. A safe set of letters we might easily remember.
How passwords have changed since then, requiring complex constant reshuffling to keep us safe.
But the passwords to our hearts are not so easy to penetrate. As to our minds, despite the efforts of some to winkle their way inside with the aim of exploiting us in this hideously unequal world.
Why do scammers to trick you into believing they’re on your side? Why do friendships dissolve? Why do parents abuse their children? Why do we hurt one another? Why?