Interesting discovery while ill
One of the things technology has done is to leave a really massive data trail behind that employers can use to say “ewww, no.. icky” when they get your resume and discover some of your college hijinks, and current love of spoilers on your Kia Sorento.
tl;dr I still don’t have a brain, starting writing again after several days 101-103 fever.
What happened to me this week was interesting. I was sick, logged into Facebook to spread my misery, and was greeted with a “hey look what has happened on this day in years past” window. That particular day was the same message I was about to send – sick, sinus misery, etc.
It wasn’t just last year, it was a year before that, two before that, so on down the line. See this is the thing, I didn’t know I had allergies that always happen right before my birthday. That never clicked in my head that my birthdays have usually been underwhelming events because I’m at the end of a nasal twister.
And they hadn’t always been, just since I moved back to the pollen pit that is Nashville after my brief hiatus from lungs full of tree spooge.
What’s more I managed to piece together from old notes in May what drugs I’d taken, what worked and what had not. Mostly from notes of “oh great, this is making me cough more!” and “nose feels like the desert” I was able to figure out a combo that got me to sleep and to stop coughing.
This is something of a wonder for me. Seriously. Besides being an insomniac (who just got his first sleep study, I highly don’t recommend this from my experience) nothing that’s even been thrown at me quite works right. I’m that 2% of the population that has severe side effects, or things simply don’t work on.
I never have heard the term “trail of personally identifiable information” used in a good context, but for me my trail of sinus misery in May captured and resold to me by Big Facebook at least got me to a point where I knew what to take and when.
That said, keeping your medical woes on a service that sells your data to the highest bidder probably is one of the stupider things I do.
