Today was 11/11/11 11:11 and we watched the Rememberance Day stuff on CBC, like good little Canadians. It was nicely done, gotta say. I don’t know much about my grandparents’ involvement in WWII. Not that they weren’t involved, and not that my mom hasn’t researched this down to the minute, but mostly that I don’t ask. Or I ask and it’s mythology. Arcane information. Historic.
In the course of my work over the years, there’s been a lot of information that I’ve heard and had to immediately forget because it’s a password, or a credit card number, or the names of children of multi-millionaires. Unlike the lyrics of pop songs from the 70s, I hear these pieces of information and my brain drops them, knowing they convey more than their simple fact. They are parts of locks, parts of the social engineering that I’ve learned to spot. Things I detect as Important Data.
This means they’re potentially dangerous for me to know, in that I might at some point forget that this information is not for public consumption, and let something slip. Oddly enough, given how often I’ve seen trust break, and security be broken, my tendency is to trust people implicitly, assuming that they would have no reason to betray me or those I have reason to defend.
Trust can bend. Security can break.
The weight that these myths can convey can cause memory to break. The point at which I sense the gravity of the information I ingest is also, tragically, the point at which the trapdoor in my head drops it.
Either that, or I don’t listen.
Or both.
Lest we forget.