Out of all the things I regret in my youth, the biggest one has to be the period where I saved everything as variation of “asdflk;djfglkejtoib”. I can’t find a single bloody file on my damn laptop because of it.

This is the equivalent of realising you’ve picked up chlamydia somewhere along the line, and now you’re dealing with the consequences. Sure, it was fun at the time but now it’s like every time I look for something on my laptop, I’m burning myself with my wee. But it’s the sting of knowing my younger self could have prevented my current affliction that burns the most. Unfortunately, young people have a tendency to flit through life without fear of concern for the consequences of STIs – Stupid Taxonomy of Information.

I don’t think my being tagged in a meme that read “nothing like the days when you’d tell your parents you were at a sleepover and you’d really be dying in a field from drinking too much vodka” by people from two different groups of friends within an hour of each other is a bad sign. I don’t think my back catalogue of assorted pimp cups (many of which have now been suitable donated to the St Vincent de Paul society) indicates an unsavoury past. I don’t think my collection of Girls of the Playboy Mansion and Laguna Beach DVDs is anything to be ashamed of. No, that’s all peachy.

It is evidence of improper filing that is the true hallmark of a young and reckless mind, with far better things to do than to consider the orderly existence of her future self. It’s easy to forget the person you once were by putting it to the back of one’s mind, but the physical files on one’s computer are not so easily erased. They can be called up and within seconds the mistakes of your past are upon. Within seconds, you remember the scattered and thrill chasing person you used to be. This is all evident in the way I used to name my files. Oping the Pandora’s box of “pictures” is a fucking nightmare. Nothing is named appropriately. Nothing is named in a way so to optimise my searches. There isn’t even any logical grouping of my images into folders – I could have at least made a folder for each occasion like “That Time We Finished the Goon Box and Wore Leopard Print Pants” or “Photos of Friends They’ll Later be Embarrassed by”. Instead, they’re just all dumped there in a confusing maze of memories.

This makes it incredibly difficult to navigate one’s way around one’s computer. You can’t find what you’re’ looking for unless you’re willing to individually search through each file, open it and see if it’s what you were searching for. And I’m not just talking about those seamless Photoshop jobs where you’ve superimposed a friend’s face on to a picture of Christina Aguilera during her Dirty Period (after her Micky Mouse Period and before her Candyman Period, she deemed it appropriate to wear arseless chaps about town and cornrow her platinum blonde hair so it looked like chains of that carpet fluff you pull out of the vacuum cleaner):

Or how you flawlessly worked your Harry Potter-loving friend’s name into a still from The Philosopher’s Stone for her birthday:

I’m talking about text documents and PDFs of academic journal chapters relied upon for assignments. I remember actually having to memorise which paper was which form how many Ds were in the file name. Speeches, assessment pieces, video files – they’re all named in a way with a total disregard for the future. I didn’t think about what would lay ahead, I was only concerned with the here and now. What a fool I was. I can’t find anything from before 2013 that isn’t named “dgfdsgfdgdfsg” or “RTHRTHW” and it’s all my fault. How wretched I must have been as a youth person.

I can only hope that young people can learn from the mistakes of my past. It’s painful admitting to who I used to be, but it’s time someone speaks up. We’ve got to break the cycle of reckless file naming. If sharing my story can stop just one teenager from ending up in my position, I’ll know my frustration won’t be in vain.