Ten years ago I went to a seminar about memorization techniques. The meeting was held in one of this old building that have soul. It was 20 degree Celsius outside making it a perfect, relaxing day.

The facilitator was a rather calm person sharing with us some memorization techniques like they were generous gifts and in deed they were, as I have learned five years later…

There I was, walking through corridors of an ancient brick castle. There were red torches on the walls. I have entered a rather big audience room, with rows of tables. I came to the first on the left. It was piled with blue broccolis. Second table legs were in the shape of unicorns.

Down the room I saw a flying cat with the face of Dwight Schrute from The Office. The cat was blowing fireballs everywhere.

I began to smile.

…

From all possible explanations of what it was, one seems to be obvious, I was delirious or/and intoxicated. Or was I?

…

The seminar took place at 4pm since I took a day off I was able at last to organise all my new photos. I have copied to a secondary backup disk, and as usual, encrypted it with a pin code. Something I was doing once a year. I have blessed that day while walking through the castle later.

It really changed that day that seemed to end with a misery and sadness.

What you have to know, is that year I had moved to another apartment. Taking all my stuff day. I needed more space to live because the room rented before was too small and in a bad neighborhood.

Something I have learned on my own skin, when someone broke into the apartment and stole my laptop. With it, all my data was gone. Except photos I took for many, many years. Memories of my younger life that I have kept safe on a backup device.

After moving to the new apartment, that had two rooms and was in a nice surrounding mostly inhabited by older generation, at last I felt safe. It took my quite some time to arrange all living issues. Eventually one evening, when the apartment looked not like a storehouse anymore, I have decided it would be great to cover new, empty walls with some photos.

I took the backup, 32GB disk out, plugged it in to my computer with a IDE slot and found a list of encrypted files with my photos, a moment I looked for.

What you really should know about me, is that I am lame at memorizing stuff. Especially numbers. When I was in the school, I had to use various tricks to remember dates of historical events. I can tell you whole story, even with more details than they teach us, because I love history, but remembering dates, those four digit inventions of Voldemort, is out of my reach.

So, as an educated graduate of software engineering studies, I have securely noted my backup files pin code on a piece of paper from my notebook. Than placed it in a small deposit in my old backpack.