Lost

Sometimes it’s good to be lost. It’s a bit less good when you lose things that are important. I’ve lost track of my non-fiction work and am presently working on collating its references and searching out its texts. Somewhere in the Shed Of All Things its possible I still have them in hard copy. Some of them exist on the internet. But some are gone.

I’ve always dashed from one thing to the next. If the deadline was hit, the copy accepted – then I was out of there and on to the next thing. I did have filing skills, but various hard drive deaths before the Cloud rendered them fairly useless for this present quest. I wish I had dutifully printed out, labelled and kept a copy of each item as a record to save myself a lot of bother later. I seem to remember having had this wish a few times. It has made stationers a lot of money from my wallet as I have splashed out on diaries, notebooks, desk calendars and organisers. None of them were effective  because they require that you actually look at them instead of daydreaming about flying cities and how to manage the geology of a constructed world from the point of view of a machine engineer.

It’s all the more galling because I used to do admin for a living and I was good at it. Of course, it was someone else’s admin. Anyhoo, somewhere on the edge of The Beautiful Zone (see picture) there needs to be an Admin Zone that is robust and the only way to achieve this is, I think, to play Admin Simulator and pretend it’s a game.

Level 1, Quest 1: You have seen Charlie Stross, who is the expert at these things, write a post about this once, somewhere.  Go forth to the internet and find that post. Implement its suggestions. A clue to the newsgroup you last saw it in is in the Massive Email Swamp. What are you waiting for?

Rewards: 1500XP, Work Saving Device Automation. Reputation With Self: Revered.

But first I must just write down this scene and notes for a Quantum Gravity novella I thought of while I was out walking the dog…