I am writing to inform you", or yes, sometimes you have to do something

I picked up the mail from the box this afternoon and found a letter addressed to me, with a notation above my name that says "TO BE OPENED BY ADDRESSEE ONLY" which, first of all, is kind of what I assumed was the rule for all mail but whatever.

So I opened it and hey, guess what! The Department of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada totally fucked up and lost a portable external hard drive containing mine, as well as 583, 000 other people's personal information. 

 (amazing reenactment of me reading the letter, made using old picture of me and picmonkey)

I read this letter once. Then I reread it. Then I frowned at it. Then I shrugged. Then I read it again. Then I read it to Ryan. Then I put it on the table and went to the bathroom because I actually had to pee the entire walk home from the bus and had been holding it this entire time. Then I came out of the bathroom and picked it up and read it again.

At first I was just ready to shred the letter, like "welp, I hope nobody steals my identity, there's nothing I can do about it now" because giving up is my go-to reaction to anything even mildly inconvenient.

But Ryan and I talked about it a bit more and he convinced me to at least look into identity theft and stuff. I ended up Googling something about this government office, and found a news article that said that this "misplacing" of information actually happened in November!!! So they waited until freaking mid-January to start informing people about this major mistake. That's two months of people not knowing their Social Insurance Number, home address, student loan amounts and other personal information has been compromised.

And that is not okay.

So, I mean, ultimately I don't want to get into what I've decided to do on my very public blog, but I do want to say that even though it's a bit of a hassle, I'm going to stand up for myself and in a very small way for other Canadians and our rights to uncompromised privacy.

I could just shrug and hope for the best, because honestly, maybe some janitor accidentally knocked the thing into the garbage can. But also? Maybe not. Maybe somebody will be sitting on my information for ten years, and then suddenly ruin my credit in horrid ways when I least expect it.

Anyway there's no way to end this blog without either saying too much or sounding a bit cryptic so let's go with cryptic. Sasquatch knows the key to Davinci's stonemason's code of the seven stars. Peace out.

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Hey, Blogger doesn't recognize "uncompromised" as a word.