Estate sales, death, and the digital life
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On Saturday the wife and I stopped by an estate sale in our neighborhood. While she was browsing the silver and china I went downstairs. There in the corner sat a PC; beige case and very plain. It was a custom made system made in St. Louis according to the tag on the back. The XP sticker and code key were were also attached. On the side of the case was a sticker with the basic specs of the machine. Nothing special but the price was $40.00! I figured the hard drive and copy of XP were worth more than that so I said what the hell and bought it. Took it home (along with a box full of software and accessories) and opened it up to make sure it wasn’t storing dust bunnies. What I found was that it had a brand new motherboard, 2.8 GHz P4 CPU and a 120 GB SATA drive inside. It only had 256 mb of memory so I went down to Office Depot, spent another $40 and bought a 512 mb chip. The previous owner didn’t have any extra software installed besides MS office so it’s like a brand new machine.
But here comes the rhyme and the reason for this post. Once I fired it up and began looking around the files it was obvious that the computer hadn’t been touched since the person who owned it died. All of her files are still on the hard drive. Information on stocks, bonds, retirement, personal letters, emails and other assorted documents. One of them appears to be an autobiography, or at least a novel in progress. It feels strange looking at a complete strangers life. I’ve archived all the files and will be moving them to a CDR for safe keeping. I’m looking to see if I can find an address and name of a relative to send them to. I don’t want to just delete them as it feels wrong to just erase them. This is someone’s life in digital form. Made me think that maybe it’s time to start getting my digital life in order in case something happens to me. So much of what I do is online; friends, acquaintances and forums that I visit. If I was gone my wife and son would at least be able to contact those in my online world to let them know something happened. I’ve seen people just suddenly disappear from an online community and have always wondered where they went.
So now it is time to get my digital life and affairs in order. I don’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon so stay tuned…
[tags]estate sales, digital, death, future[/tags]
3 Comments
Cliffystones
June 12th, 2007
at 5:21pm
You’re a good guy, Mike. Pay it forward. A lot of a-holes would attempt to use this info for nefarious reasons. Or like an old boss of mine, who had the gall/insensitivity to go and let a co-worker know that he’d read confidential letters of hers concerning her divorce. They had been left on her old work PC when the IS dept. upgraded her without notice!!
Mental Floss
June 12th, 2007
at 5:43pm
Also be sure to leave a copy of all passwords you can think of, handwritten on a sheet of paper (not great to have in digital form) with someone or included in your will.
A list of online communities you hang out (ie: WoW, IRC, newsgroups, mailing lists) would also be a good idea, since it might be nice to let people know that your sudden absence wasn’t because you found a life, but because you lost one. ;)
Hugoton Horatio
June 18th, 2007
at 1:14am
I would suggest you contact the person(s) company who held the
estate sale and find out who the attorney is for the estate and then
make that CDR info available to the proper probate court of
jurrisdiction for the place where the person lived. The attorney will
have that information or you can obtain it with a few phone calls.
I have reason not to trust some attorneys this day and age and since
there are stocks, bonds, etc which may be quite valuable, the probate
court would make certain that the proper person(s) who were due the
proceeds of them would get them and not some attorney.