Storing in a Cloud

By Kevin Parsons

What is the deal on this 'Cloud' thing, anyway? Let's say I have four bars of silver I want to store safely. I go to my bank and say to Kent, my banker whom I trust, and say, "Kent, store these safely." Kent says, "Sure," and we put them in a safe deposit box. What's the first word in safe deposit box? I know, you hate it when there's a test right away...  but the answer is safe. And where is the safe deposit box? ( I swear, this is the last test question.) In a safe. When I store stuff in there, I believe it is pretty much...safe.

Now we store our computer data in a cloud. When was the last time you looked up into the sky, saw a cloud, and thought, "Now I feel safe." In fact, you might have said, "Oh, oh," and hurried to take the laundry inside.

And how do they store it in a cloud? When Kent stores my bars of silver, we put them in the box in any order. But my data, as we all know, is 5Gb of x's and o's. I studied and found that Gb means, 'Gazillion billion.' So somewhere, to keep my data right, someone has played a gazillion billion games of tic tac toe. And my information has to be stored, 5Gbs of it, in order. Get one tic tac toe game out of order and your picture of a dancing bunny in a garden of dandelions becomes a Picasso painting of Lecter Hannibal square dancing. 

Have you ever tried to set anything in a cloud? I've flown and an airliner flies right through it like it's condensation or something. I know data is weightless, but still, how could a cloud hold it?

When I bought my iPad (a tool of Satan), the friendly geek with piercings and tattoos in designs and places I never imagined informed me that they would store all my information for free. Cool. How much data? He broke it down into Geezer terms; "Lots and lots of it." No more flash drive. And when has a flash made you feel safe? Flash in the pan? I digress.

However after a month I exceeded my storage space. They would be happy to store my data for $10 a year. Two months later I needed to pay $25 a year. Six months, $100 a year.  At this rate it would be cheaper to hire someone to copy everything down with a pencil on a legal pad. And are there illegal pads? Just wondering.

Won't we run out of clouds soon? And why don't I see clouds with x's and o's on them? If we have a cloudburst will it rain down in bytes? And why isn't there a guy I trust to help store it?

Maybe I'll just get my own cloud and store my data in it. I've got a better idea.

I'll just store it under the mattress. 

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