Dialogue with the Past
What I have been doing with my PC is using it as an external storage device to supplement my memory, recording an overwhelming amount of information, and retrieving it at will.
Since I spend a significant amount of my life on company work, I do not want it to be meaningless time. Because the jobs I held often required referencing past history and cases, and because the companies I joined had a penchant for making us write daily sales reports and monthly reports, I began to record my days in detail.
Upon learning that a tool called grep could extract sentences containing specific words, I realized that by creating continuous sentences without line breaks, I could use them as a text database.
What I realized after starting this was how vague human memory is. 'Before Golden Week last time...' might actually be a year ago. Since I speak based on records, I can correct that. This ended up creating a sense of discomfort with those around me.
What is frustrating is when I cannot find something I thought I had recorded. No matter how detailed the records are, it is impossible to describe everything.
However, as I continue to perform grep searches, the precision of what I record increases. It is possible to teach what I am doing, but the level of proficiency cannot be taught.
There are management teams that mandate sales reports while nonchalantly saying, 'The past is useless.' Alternatively, I am told that my daily reports contain too much jargon and are too long, so people do not feel like reading them.
I continued to write over 400,000 characters a year, not for the bosses who force me to submit daily reports, but for my future self, or perhaps for a future successor.
I write using VZEditor on an HP200LX, drop down to the console, and run wgrep with a batch file. I keep the daily report files on the company's shared drive, but doing the above is a bit of a high hurdle.
Shortly before I turned 65, the person in charge of the company's systems created an extraction tool for me in just an hour or two. I feel relieved thinking that my record assets will be passed on.
However, whether a successor who records like I do will appear is another matter entirely. I hope that once people realize how easily they can search and extract information, it will lead to changes in what and how they record.