-Document Packet: Fill & Download for Free

I once ran from the FBI, and almost got away clean. Now it’s not as bad as it sounds since I hadn’t done anything illegal. I just saw an opportunity to screw with them, and I seized upon it.Many years ago I worked for an organization that had a reason to send some people over to the the old Soviet Union. The visa process was a bit of a nightmare, and I occasionally had to take packets of visa application documents to the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco. Since we were still in the throes of the Cold War, there was always a car parked across the street with a couple of FBI agents in it, watching the consulate entrance.Late one afternoon I had to take another packet of documents to the consulate, and by the time I signed out a company car and drove to the city it was already dark. When I arrived at the consulate, which was surrounded by an eight foot metal fence, it was closed. I looked around there was no one in sight, and even the FBI car wasn’t in it’s customary place across the street. They must have left their rather obvious stake-out for a dinner/potty break.I pressed the buzzer button by the gate several times before a uniformed Soviet soldier came out to see what I wanted. Between his limited knowledge of English and my limited Russian, mixed with some hand gestures, he understood “visa” but let me know that he didn’t have a key to open the gate. I would have to throw the document packet over the fence for him.Just as I heaved the ten pounds or so of documents over the fence to the soldier, the FBI guys returned. They must have been quite curious as to what I had just tossed to our sworn enemy. It was then that I decided to screw with them a bit.Their car was facing in the opposite direction as mine, so I sprinted to my car and took off at something a bit greater than the speed limit. With squealing tires, the FBI made a quick U-turn and tried to follow me. Up and down those San Francisco hills, I made a series of evasive turns, never letting them get close, killed my lights and ducked into a parking lot. The FBI car shot right past me, then turned down another street. In that moment I was Steve McQueen, although my company Ford Granada wasn’t quite in the same class as the Mustang that he had in Bullitt. I had made my escape!The next day I was called into the head human resources guy’s office at work. The FBI had somehow made my license plate, contacted the company to let them know that someone driving one of their vehicles had tossed a suspicious package to the Soviets and given them the slip. When I explained what I had done, he got a good laugh out of it, and I left with an admonition to never, ever do that again.

On my way through UK customs.“Where are you from?”“China.”“What are you doing here?”“Doing an off-campus program from my school.”“Where is your school?”“Wisconsin, in the States.”So far so good, eh?“Do you have any documents about this program,” he asked without looking, “that’re in English?”Now imagine how hurt and furious I was, when I just told him I was from a school in US, and he posed a question on me according to my looks.I wish I had slapped my whole document packet in his blond ponytailed face.

There will always be files just as there will always be assembly language instructions.But assembly language instructions are not something users concern themselves with.And I suspect files will go the same way. Users will expect their apps to see their data, sync their data and occasionally share their data with others. But the underlying complexity of this should be hidden from non-experts - and managed by systems better equipped to deal with the complexity.People here who are defending files are actually defending documents; Packets of information and metadata they need to exchange and occasionally manage.But what they need to interact with are manipulable abstractions of those documents. Not files at all but symbolic abstractions of information.Documents and files are not same thing. A document might be many files. It might be simply a reference to other things. Or a search query or a mixture of entities. It might be meta-data linking entities across many different machines. It might be a reference to the entire history of of a document, with each incremental change logged in a system which tracks successive versions.The notion that we should let users directly manipulate the files themselves is a horrific prospect, as dangerous and illogical as letting users directly change the contents of CPU registers.That era is coming to a close. Thank goodness.