Tech needs better definitions
As the curtain fell on 2024, I had a baby. It was Friday the 13th, a date often associated with bad luck thanks to European superstitions stretching back a couple of hundred years. There is even a specific term to describe the “fear of Friday the 13th”: paraskevidekatriaphobia. Although urban legend actually has it that the shrink that coined it declared anyone who learned to pronounce it would be cured, which suggests a sense of humor (and reminds us how extra humans can be…).
And while my husband and I likewise noted the date as a humoress quirk, bad luck would, in fact, catch-up with us. Just five weeks later my Dad died. Baz Luhrman was onto something when he said the real troubles in life blindside you on an idle Tuesday afternoon.
Though he’d been ill for a while my father’s passing wasn’t expected, and I found myself in the strange and bewildering position of both gaining and losing a fundamental life force in such quick succession that it felt simultaneous. In the paperwork and aftermath, I occasionally confused my father’s DOD for our baby’s DOB. Those who have had similar experiences may relate to the feeling of being in some strange existential continuum, whereby it seems impossible that there wasn’t some kind of transfer. Like one Dr. Who fluidly regenerating into the next.
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You The Data 