“Is that the fire alarm?” I ask.
“The food court fire alarm doesn’t sound like that,” she replies.
“So that must mean this is all a dream. And there’s a fire in my apartment building.”
“You really thought this was the new Burger King uniform? Really.”

4. Slippers are not good for walking through several feet of snow. In fact, they’re terrible. Though surprisingly, if you manage to avoid getting any snow in them, which is next to impossible, they are very warm.
5. When at the corner store getting coffee, a neighbor may recognize you:

“Oh, you must be from the apartment building. I had a little more time to get ready, but I live in there too.”
“You mean, you don’t get coffee in a blizzard wearing only slippers and pjs?”
“Not regularly, no.”

6. Even the morning after a blizzard, six or seven fire trucks plus an ambulance and various support vehicles will still manage to converge on one city block. That hasn’t really been plowed much yet.
7. Firemen are the same, throughout time. They have a good sense of humor, but you get the sense you would not want to be on the other side of a fight with them. It might have been the snow and the crazy amount of stuff they were carrying, but they certainly seem to have a swagger.

“Thank you for everything!” Said a neighbor, enthusiastically.
“Any time, ma’am.” Replied a fireman. “Well, not any time, but, you know, it was my pleasure.”

8. You can still get a shitload of water up to an apartment in close-to-freezing temperatures. I feel bad for whoever lives under that apartment.
9. Manfriend will sleep through the fire alarm and have to be woken up. Repeatedly.
10. Snow’s great when you don’t have to shovel it.

BONUS:

11. The last thing you want to hear while you’re in the bathroom is the fire alarm going off for the second time. On the bright side, it does put a few things in perspective. And we responded a lot faster than we did when we were woken up by it. Fuck. Today is going to be awesome.

p.s. I did NOT set the fire. In fact, I’m beginning to think there’s a competition between my neighbors to see how many firetrucks they can get on any given day. I imagine they’re two angry little old men from opposite sides of the building. And they mutter under their breath, things like: “Four alarm fire? That ain’t nothin. I’ll show him. I’ll spill some kerosene around and make everyone go outside in the snow at 7 am. Show them. I’ll show them all!”

There are two sides to the personal privacy issue. One is that most companies, programmers, organizations, et al, figure that if the same data is available anyway, aggregated in a different format, it’s fair game. In other words, if I can take the time to hunt down all the information about someone in a time consuming way, how is it any different if a web site aggregates that data for me in one easy-to access format. The logic being that if the data was already out there, it’s no different in a new format. In one universe, that’s true, but in our universe it just isn’t.

The thing that worries me is that most people address issues this way, without second thought to how people might react, or more importantly, how it may jeopardize the private information and make it more likely for personal information to become compromised.

Are there legitimate uses for this data? Sure. But the bottom line remains that in our society, identity theft is by and large a crime of convenience. When data is made easily accessible, or, conversely, when doing a bit of work can get you a lot of personal information (e.g. debit card skimmers), it becomes not only feasible for malicious individuals to harm people, but it makes it very, very tempting.

When people had to dig up data the old fashioned way, by visiting government offices and sifting through paper work (or waiting for someone else to do it), it made data mining inconvenient and expensive in terms of time spent. It was not an efficient or effective way of stealing. It was, however, effective for people with more legitimate interests, who likely were interested only in a small amount of data pertaining to their individual interests.

With new technology comes a new way of thinking about things, especially privacy. What distresses me as an IT professional as well as a person with shit to lose, is how little these issues are considered. I have no problem being the voice of reason. I’ll continue to bring up this issue. It just scares me when I’m the only one who considers it.