Good Advice?

Late last week, the news broke regarding the Equifax data breach.  According to their website, mine was one of the identities compromised, but then later I read that they might just be randomly telling you that to lure you into signing up for their ID monitoring services, which start off free but then after a year require a fee to continue. So maybe my data was compromised, or maybe it wasn't, but at this point I'm not sure how much it matters, since my identity has already been stolen to file a fraudulent income tax return, among other things. At this point, who knows what my identity has been up to.

Also, there could be some really old college textbooks out there floating around that have my social security number written in them. When I was in college, students were advised to write their SSN's in their books.  I think the reasoning was that in the event the books were stolen, it would make them easier to trace.  This was probably bad advice, but I'm sure I did it anyway because I was a gullible freshman.  I had just parted with $200 for a green hardcover copy of "The Poetry of John Donne"*, and I was going to guard that bad boy with my life.  If you can find that copy of John Donne's master works, you too could steal my identity.

After all the data breaches my data has been part of, I could probably paint my social security number on my roof in red paint and it wouldn't make any difference.

To all you young whippersnappers out there who just cannot wait to become adults and get away from your annoying parents with their stupid rules and their nagging and their insatiable curiosity about what you are doing at school and who your friends are and why you spend so much money at Starbucks, here is one of the not-enjoyable aspects of adulting: figuring out what is good advice and what is bad advice.

For example, what to do about this Equifax data breach?  Do you sign up for the monitoring service, or do you not? It depends on who you ask.  Some advice-givers tell you to sign up, and some say, run for the hills; whatever you do, do not sign up for that monitoring service- why would you want the people who mismanaged your personal data in the first place in charge of monitoring if other people were trying to steal it?  I have no idea what to do.  This is outside the Mom of No's area of expertise.

For a brief moment, I mentally explored the concept of cancelling all the credit cards, going off the grid, and hiding all my cash in a coffee can buried in a secret spot that I would divulge to no one. However,  I don't think my employer will actually pay me in cash and for the next four years I have to fill out something called a FAFSA, which requires income tax information, so going financially rogue isn't really going to work well for me logistically at this time.

Before the onset of Hurricane Irma, there was a meme going around Facebook advising people to store their most precious memories in their dishwasher.  A dishwasher, after all, seems to be watertight, so in theory this idea sounds great.  However, other people were saying that this was a bad idea and it didn't actually work- dishwashers aren't really watertight and if your house did flood,  you could come home to a dishwasher full of wet paper pulp that used to be your prized photographs and your important documents.

No matter what problem you are trying to solve, or what stage of your life you are in, bad and conflicting advice abounds.  Because I am approaching the early stages of geezerhood, I remember when the sources of information were limited to your family and friends, the 7 PM news on TV, newspapers, and books. Now you can log on to Facebook, post any request for information, and watch the conflicting information roll in. It's probably a good thing social media was not yet a thing when I had infants and toddlers; Mommy boards were bad enough.  Facebook would have sent me over the edge in terms of attempting to make informed parenting decisions.

So, if you are wondering what to do about the data breach, or trying to decide where to store essential documents and important irreplaceable photographs, I'm actually not sure what to tell you. I'm still trying to figure it all out myself.  In a few weeks I have to fill out my first FAFSA; I'm sure it will take weeks to recover from reading all the Internet advice about that. 


*John Donne, English Poet, 1572-1631, famous for the phrase "No Man is an Island".  I had to write a paper on it.  He's actually not that bad as poets go, although I'm more of a science and historical fiction reader.