We are bound by chains and haunted by boogeymen wherever we go these days, and there is no shaking them.
It’s a factor of technology, which is causing the various aspects of our lives to overlap in ways that range from a hassle to complete mortification.
This has affected me drastically since I have left my old job after 18 years and moved somewhere new.
In the stability and isolation from some new developments that long-term employment brings, I had never encountered “OneDrive.”
OneDrive snuck into my life last winter when I bought the first new home computer I had purchased in many years. I had no idea what it was, other than a real pain in the neck. When I’d save documents or pictures, they wouldn’t end up where I had expected they should on the computer. I lost things, seemingly forever, then I found them when I least expected to.
After several sessions of this I caught on that there was something called “OneDrive” that was always popping up as the default when all I wanted to do was save things on folders on my desktop. You have to go around your butt to get to your elbow to save things where they should be saved instead of losing them in the ether with OneDrive.
I still didn’t know what OneDrive was, though, until I was working a summer job. There I was, wearing my suit, hair fixed properly, typing away professionally, and going into the computer’s Pictures files to get some work-related photos when up popped personal pictures of all sorts that had no place in a workplace.
That was alarming. How did they get there?
Another time, again in the office, I went for a business report and came upon a file full of personal papers that should not be out of the house at all, much less in a shared office.
What in the world was going on?
It was OneDrive, that Big Brother that haunts us wherever we go, crossing lines from personal to business and back again, two worlds that should not have that overlap.
OneDrive is the end to privacy as we know it.
It was eerie and unsettling to have lost that privacy and have everything jumbled us as it should not be. I didn’t understand the black magic that caused it.
Until one day it occurred to me: During the first few days of my summer job, I did not have company email set up for me yet on the company computer, so I had to use my personal email. It was using my personal email on my work computer that let the demon of OneDrive into the office and comingled all my stuff.
OneDrive went on to haunt me in the job I have now, executive director of the Martinsville-Henry County Historical Society, though at least this time I recognized what was going on when it happened. The cause was the same, too: I had been using my personal email for the job before I had gotten signed in to the museum’s email account.
So far, I haven’t found a way to go back to the old way of just saving things onto the computer they are meant to be on as the default. I deactivated OneDrive on my home computer, but even so, every time I go to save something, OneDrive still comes up as the default and it takes maneuvering through several layers of confusing folders just to get to where it used to go automatically.
The age of technology means everything follows you around everywhere, all the time.
