Every breath you take and every move you make
Every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you
Every single day and every word you say
Every game you play, every night you stay, I'll be watching you
Opening lines from The Police and their fine tune called “Every Breathe You Take”
I think maybe my paranoia is finally beginning to take root.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not big on conspiracy theory or anything but the more I read about privacy issues the more afraid I become. It’s not just the government either (read this for my thoughts on that), corporations have me under their watchful eye and they can monitor every click of the mouse and every website I decide to visit to I can be targeted about which ads they want to send my way. I don’t think it’s too farfetched that sometime in the near future they will know more about me and what I purchased years ago than what I’ve forgotten.
I don’t even want to get started on the banks and other financial institutions that monitor every transaction they possibly can or the hospitals who might refuse my treatment based off my credit history.
As it stands, right now I’m in the midst of looking for a job after spending close to thirty five years in the financial services industry. It seems that the very same industry that buttered my bread and enabled me to pay the bills now wants nothing to do with me. I post resume after resume that details my experience in all types of markets and types of securities yet my inbox remains empty. I wonder what nameless faceless person whose job it is in Human Resources to screen potential applicants could be thinking or if they are even thinking at all. Shit, they probably have farmed that entire process out to some internal search engine that looks for certain key words before dumping it into the electronic scrap heap.
Maybe it's time to look for another line of work.
I used to think I was an optimist. I served my country proudly, never took a dime in public assistance and paid my taxes on a fairly regular basis and now I find that after close to forty years later, it has all gone up in smoke.
With little to do to pass the time I’ve taken up re-reading some books that I should have gotten to a long time ago. One of them is Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and while some of the parallels are unmistakable some have gone even further than I could possibly imagine. I feel a bit like Winston Smith, stuck in world that has somehow passed me by and for the time being, powerless to do anything about it.
Given my current state of affairs, that probably wasn’t the best choice of reading materials.
Maybe I should have stuck to the Disney version of Mary Poppins.