» My computer gave away my secrets

A long time ago on an Interweb far far away
My flatmate had an irritating girlfriend. She was young naive, dumb as dogshit and half as interesting. Of course he proceeded to fall in lurve with this waste of DNA and invited her to live with us.

Well I had a shiny Windows 95 PC and a brand spanking new top of the range K56flex modem and thanks to my flatmate she had a hotmail account. So there she was dialled up and online, running up my phonebill whilst staring blankly at hotmail's compose screen. No doubt trying to figure out how to spell "I'm a vacuous whore"

I patiently explained how she could compose her messages in Word whilst offline and then copy and paste them into hotmail in a quick efficient burst of dialled up activity.

All was well and good and perhaps she thought that the fact that I had set her up with her own password protected profile kept her sordid missives entirely private. In fact her privacy was ensured only by the fact that the none of the three IT professionals in the house gave two hoots what she was writing to her silly little friends.

Of course when you open Word to do a bit of work and it springs up with 1 recovered document found, then that's a different matter. And if the document so recovered details her plans for exactly when and how she plans to be leaving her boyfriend/my flatmate within the next few months and includes who she is planning to run away with - well then it all suddenly becomes far more interesting.

Did I tell my flatmate about his impending dumpage? Would you? Which course of activity makes me more of a git?

In the end I kept tight lipped working on the theory that the idiot girl was so young and stupid she could be making stuff up to tell her idiot friends and even fixed word 95 so that the recovered document didn't spring up every time word was opened as it was prone to do.

However it turns out that I was the second person to have discovered this message. Days later my flatmate confided that he had read all her e-mails after this recovered document thrust itself into his attention. He was simply giving her the chance to come clean of her own accord. Subtle hints went over her head and soon she was being invited to lie outright. So you have no plans to leave then? no plans written down and e-mailled to your friends then? Even with her belongings thrown onto the street and her Dad called to ensure she was picked up and had somewhere to stay denial was the order of the day. Screaming shouting, the sudden accusations that he'd beaten her. The police being called. Spectacular!
(Tue 14th Feb 2006, 14:49, More)