First of all you need something to hide from. Mr. Swiss? But after 48 years of marriage there is nothing left to hide.

He has his little corner of the computer world in our home and I have mine. His corner is a corridor away, so what could  possibly go wrong. I leave him to his devices and he lets me get on with mine. There are times when the sun is shining and the birds are singing and I realise there is another world out there, and so I may take a walk. He remains in his hideout, or might read a book. That’s the life of a golden oldie couple. We do not hide, we just do our own thing.

If we really need human contact we can talk to each other. I might not be listening, might not hear him from his hideout and this can also be the other way. We both have those mobile phones, so we could always call each other: although to such dire straits we have not yet progressed.

I never lived in a world of hideouts. I grew up in a house row. The house was built at a time when you could be glad to have a roof over your head, no bathroom and toilet in the garden. Rooms were small, not many, and if you wanted to hide you could not. The walls had ears and there were no secrets, as there were no places to hide the secrets. I had my own bedroom, but as mum would say if she were still with us today, there is not enough room to swing a cat – not that cat swinging was some sort of hobby.

I remember as a kid that I hid from men with moustasches. That was one of those silly kid things and I do not why, because I am married to a three day beard or whatever. If mum had a visit from a man with a moustache (I remember Uncle Frank had one) I would dive under the next bed and not come out until he was gone. Actually Uncle Frank was a nice guy, but he had a moustache. And believe me those beds in the old days were not the best places to hide, they were the birthplace of dust bunnies, beause mum probably did not want to kill them.

Today’s hideouts look more like this. We call them “memory sticks” because they are the secret memories of our computers. Computers are a dangerous species. Even if they die a painful death, their secrets can still be discovered on the hard disk if you have the knowhow and instruments to  unlock them. There are cyberspies everywhere. some even have a name like “Facebook” or “Google”, but perhaps you have secrets that you want everyone to know. I am running a risk at blogging, because it does not really belong to me, but the thousands (millions?) of people that follow them and read them daily.

And then there is the progressive state where the financial  business is done on the computer. If you want online banking, the risk is there, like it or not. On my Windows computer I have something called an “incognito window” where all the traces of my secret cyber paths are not registered, preventing people discovering where I go to operated my money transfers and washing,  at least I hope so. We can only take so many precautions, but the traces do not appear in the browser.

There are also the secret files where you store your passwords. We should of course have our passwords stored in our brain. I have about 20-30 sites with passwords, and passwords should be changed regularly. Being a 70 year old golden oldie, I often cannot remember the names of colleagues, or their telephone numbers (all on the iPhone) so how am I supposed to remember the passwords. Where there is a will there is a way, and for this we have the memory stick miracle. Just a little stick, but fill it up with your passwords. They are there forever if you do not inadvertently delete them. However, I do not have the time to plug in the memory stick every time I need to know a password, so I have a list in a secret file, hidden in a secret place that only I know (and Mr. Swiss in case I forget where I put it).  This is the genial solution, the modern extension of the hideout called “memory stick”. As you can see I have many, so now the problem is which memory stick stores the memories. This is extra confusion. If someone discovers my cyber hideout, he will have to find the right memory stick. Who knows, perhaps they explode when the thief wants to apply them – oh yes, we golden oldies have our devious methods.

Daily Prompt: Hideout? What’s that?