The Secret Blog of Patrick “Patos” Manning

Just received a phone call from a person whose identity is none of your damn business, expressing concern over a series of sex videos featuring a local celebrity currently circulating on the Internet. I told the caller that while I am local and a celebrity of sorts, it was not likely that the videos featured either me, or the caller, or both of us, for that matter, or even a third party.

Just to be 100% certain, however, after I hung up, I checked both my computer and my Blackberry to make sure that there was nothing on either device that could be construed as even vaguely incriminating. Also checked the vault where I keep my stash of DVDs, and was pleased to find that all 23 discs were still there.

I also made a few phone calls around ministerial circles to see if anyone could verify the identities of the persons featured in the actual set of videos. The most enthusiastic response came from Mariano Browne, who provided an unsolicited blow-by-blow account of two of the films and invited me to an after-work screening of the entire series that he was hosting in the Ministry of Trade and Industry conference room. When I told him that I did not consider this to be an appropriate use of government premises he told me I could stick Gary Hunt’s $2m flagpole up where the sun don’t shine, or something to that effect. It’s a real shame Mariano knows some of the things he knows, or I’d have fired him on the spot.

The most disturbing aspect of the situation, however, is the manner in which I’m hearing this horrific breach of privacy took place. If it is true that the person featured in the videos sent his/her computer to a certain enterprise on Mucurapo Road for repairs, and if an employee of said company copied the videos, then I’m hoping the computer’s owner is going to slap a big lawsuit on the company and initiate a boycott of its services. Nor is a certain computer giant in Cupertino, California going to be happy to hear that its T&T reseller is at the centre of such a scandal.

While I am always careful either to erase from my hard drive or to copy to DVD most content I believe could be potentially incriminating (including any document containing the keywords “calder” and “hart”), at any given time, my GMail account harbours hundreds of harmless e-mails containing information of a sensitive nature, including messages where I respond “LOL” to comments about Colm Imbert and Gary Hunt’s Napoleon complexes, Jack Warner’s speech impediment or anything involving Panday.

It gives me chills to think that some idle geek in a computer company could copy these things and spread them around, thereby damaging the good relationships I enjoy with all of these people.