Virtual Spring Cleaning

Voices of Experience

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Telephone: (250) 374-7467

My two cents

Moneca Jantzen Editor

Ijust finished doing my taxes for 2022 and as usual it was a chaotic and frustrating experience, partly because CRA unexpectedly clawed back a good chunk of my refund, but also because gathering information for the process is always a bit painful. On the bright side, at least I will still get a small refund this year. If I were still using the expertise of a bookkeeper, I am that classic person that shows up with a shoebox full of disorganized papers and incomplete records. Increasingly, however, there is no paper trail because everyone wants us to go paperless.

Theoretically, I’m agreeable to the concept of going paperless, but in practical terms I am a diehard paper person. My stacks and stashes of paper and random doom boxes around the house are a testament to this. I am my father’s daughter in this regard. I’m not a hoarder by any means, but I could stand to declutter on a monthly basis.

My chaotic analog filing system has simply transferred to a chaotic approach to digital record-keeping and in many ways I find this even more annoying than chaotic piles of paper. Logging in and out of various websites, remembering usernames and passwords and then digging through the digital records is actually less convenient to me. I would much rather have a physical piece of paper to refer to and file. Instead, I now have random pdfs stored on various devices and I probably wouldn’t know where to find it again because it likely has some gibberish file name. I didn’t rename it because I was in a rush.

Another issue is “out of sight, out of mind.” While doing my most recent taxes, I discovered that the city has been accumulating fees and late charges for a business licence for my business that no longer exists. When I moved in 2020, I assumed that I wasn’t going to be charged for a business licence at an address where I no longer lived, but I was wrong. Needless to say, had I had a hard copy of this bill I would have addressed the problem sooner. Instead, I have been confronted by a growing digital record filed in a database into which I rarely think to look. I’m still not sure how this bureaucratic snafu is going to be resolved, but hopefully in my favour. It’s just a really good example of how things can go awry in a paperless environment that is clearly less than perfect.

While I have succumbed to giving up most of my paper invoices, I really miss those physical reminders and that paper trail and documentation. Email reminders are just not the same especially because they get buried even faster than a piece of paper would.

Like most of us, I have been using computers and the internet for decades and I feel like things have gotten a lot messier than I really want them to be, i.e., too many email addresses, forgotten usernames and passwords, accumulating unopened messages, etc. It is not surprising that there is actually an app out there that gathers people’s digital subscriptions, many of which we tend to forget about and continue getting charged unbeknownst to ourselves months or years later.

All of this chaos combined has me contemplating the idea of “cyber” or “digital hygiene” in a broader sense than is typically considered. Cyber hygiene is conventionally defined as strong passwords, good security practices, updating software, avoiding phishing scams, etc. My idea extends into a sort of Marie Kondoesque purge of extraneous email accounts, email messages, downloads, old software and newsletter subscriptions along with a surgical focus on the things that need to remain for daily life to carry on without too much struggle.

I’m sure that cleaning up in this dramatic way will lessen my online presence and make me a little bit safer. I have always marveled at all the people I knew pre-internet era that still don’t pop up in a search if I Google them—to be so lucky to still be relatively anonymous in the world after four decades of virtual life.

As I head into my sixtieth year I can’t help but think about tidying things up. Not only will this virtual decluttering eventually make things easier for me and keep me out of overwhelm, it will ultimately make things easier for my family when something happens to me. The last thing I want is for my loved ones to be left with more of a bureaucratic nightmare than necessary. Let the digital purge and spring cleaning begin!

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Editor: Moneca Jantzen editor@connectornews.ca

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