72 | July 2012 | woman this month On a good day, my BFF can truly have some strange ideas. It keeps me on my toes and is the reason I love hanging out with her so much. After all, who wants friends that are boring? LOL! We do see the world a bit differently though. Some days we can be shopping together and I am amazed at how close our styles are when we both grab for the same Coach or Prada handbag, but then the next day we will be enjoying coffee together and I will be completely blown away by the thoughts that she has. I mean, for all the modernity, for the freedoms that we have and that the Women’s Lib movement fought for, there we are relaxing and she just comes out with, “My life is too busy! We need to employ a cleaner!” WoMentality Hard-headed Woman Digital Domestic As girls in the 21st century, we have given up many things. Are the passwords to our computers about the last thing we have left? I am annoyed at this point, because we had always said we wouldn’t buy in to the idea that everything can be done for us in this country and that we don’t need to do it ourselves. However, as I start to get on my soap box and lament the fact that we spend half of our lives shopping and aren’t actually all that busy at all, she asks me to let her clarify her statement. “I mean we should all have a cleaner!”, she says, “A ‘Digital Domestic’ or a ‘Cyber Cleaner’, for our computers, iPods, iPads and gizmos.” I still maintain that we aren’t that physically busy, but she has a point that the digital world poses a different set of challenges. In our own cyber lives, things can get a bit out of control. Photos, songs, lyrics, albums, hard drives, back ups, double backups, syncing, downloads, documents, PDFs, emails, instant messages. Gigabytes, megabytes, terabytes, inboxes, sent folders, junk, spam, contacts, eBooks, iTunes, Blackberry messages and iPhone notes and more. My mother used to complain about Dad’s hoarding of old records in boxes in the garage. Well, she should see the state of my “desktop”. Wouldn’t it be nice if, everyday, after a hectic download session or friends emailing and Skyping, you could sit back and just view a cleanly filed, well organised computer screen; knowing that everything is virus free, that backups are performed in a timely fashion, stored in sequential order and filed somewhere on your iCloud for later use. I have little doubt that someone will indeed offer this service one day, but here’s the catch. Although a good 80 per cent of us barely understand what it is we do on computers anyway — it amazes us that documents and files go “somewhere” and we can never find them again — most of us would be pretty dubious about letting a stranger have access to our digital files and identities. After all we have heard about loss of personal identities and the theft of private information, our passwords and personal digital information have become a closely guarded secret. I doubt many of us would truly want an “unknown” rummaging through our cyber lives — to let someone into your hard drive electronically, to clean out the deadwood, sort the files, read the documents and delete the superfluous in life. What next? A nanny to look after the children we so desperately wanted? A surrogate because we’re too busy with the career to have a child ourselves? Will we relent and allow strangers into our homes to clean and cook for our own families? Oh yes wait! We did already! Well, considering that the latter three are already in existence, it seems futile to argue over my BFF’s request for a “digital domestic”. Why not have someone clean the computer, file the documents and diagnose the viruses on the hard drive? Why should I fight for our privacy, when we have already allowed strangers into our houses, kitchens, bedrooms, our family and children’s lives. The rest, well, it’s only papers and documents after all. With a bit of planning, you can make sure that any of the really important stuff is stored somewhere that is protected and then let the expert do the rest!
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