These ribs are gonna need a few more hours in this smoke house
It’s the most powerful global brand
We have a digital timer attached with a magnet to the side of our refrigerator. It’s right next to the stove and counter prep area, and we use it for timing various cooking activities that need to be timed. It’s actually sort of fancy and has two separate timers on it … so you can time two things at once. Not just one thing. Two things. Like say you’re baking a baked good and also stoving a stoved good. You could do them both!
Whenever you use the timer and it counts down to zero and it beeps and you then tell the beeping to stop by pressing a button the timer goes back to whatever time you had just set it to. Presumably so you could use that time again, or I guess because what else would it do?
As part of my constantly running housewife OPSEC policies, every time I walk past this timer and it’s not in use but it still has whatever time was last used on it, I reset it to zero. What this also means is that I’m only ever resetting times that other people in my house have used on the timer, because I always reset it to zero immediately after I’ve used it. This is part of my OPSEC policy for the simple reason that we want to minimize the amount of information that we are leaking out of the house for observation by THE ENEMY, and clearly the last-used time on the kitchen timer is a piece of information, and thus resetting it zero reduces the information leakage.
I guess when you think about it “this guy obsessively resets his kitchen timer down to zero all the time” is ALSO a piece of information which is leaking out of the household if that were to be observed, but that seems more vague and higher level than the specific times of the specific things we’re timing, so I’ve stuck with it.
Aside from the obvious OPSEC benefits, I think there’s also a tidying up aspect to having the timer at zero. It feels more symmetrical somehow. Can you imagine how messy it would look to have one timer show something like “05:00” and have the other time show “45:00”. Yuck and double yuck.
One thing I’ve also considered doing is just randomly running the timer for amounts of time that don’t correspond to things we’re cooking. Like I’d walk past and set it to half an hour but not put anything in the oven. This could “throw them off the scent” as it were, cooking pun not intended there.
When I reflect on this practice, part of me believes that I am likely not being surveilled and the OPSEC-relevant benefits of constantly clearing the time on this timer is totally wasted time which does not bring our family any true benefit from whomever THE ENEMY is in this case. I also sometimes wonder whether this specific piece of information (the times being used on the kitchen timer) are actually relevant to our enemies plans? Like, so what if they know how long we’re cooking things?
But then on the other hand - it’s exactly that sort of complacency and second guessing that will lead to the sort of mistakes that this organization simply cannot tolerate. It’s like when that one admiral guy recommended you make your bed first thing in the morning. It’s not that making your bed is the most important thing … but how will you do the important things if you haven’t built a foundation out of doing the simple things?
The Jesus in the nativity has a polka dot blanket on
Amongst the many media diet and truth problems we appear to have during these difficult times is this problem — way more people than ever are processing information by themselves, alone. Listening to a podcast, watching a YouTube video by yourself, reading an unreliable website on your smart device, etc.
Back in the day when you’d have to sit around the radio or tv with your family and friends, you’d hear something nutty and your dad could be like “hey, that’s nutty” and you’d be like “ah yes, that is in fact nutty, I will disbelieve it” but now you’re over in the corner buried in your ear buds and instead of learning it’s nutty you believe it and then you contribute to and perpetuate how, generally speaking, frigging dumb some of this has become.