Nothing you ever learn is wasted, even if it’s originally trivia and over time becomes pointless. I’m not selling this very well. But I did a thing this week and without any conceivably connection to anything I happen to have picked up before, there was a connection and I’ve been fixating on it.

All I did was have a week off. Mostly. Actually, pretty close to entirely. And I quickly found myself having to check what day was which, I was quickly living at odd hours of the day. I had a bad night’s sleep early on in the week, so I just had a lie-in. Cooking for one is tedious and I’d keep putting that off, so I’d end up eating at even odder hours, which might have contributed to the sleeping.

But overall, I had this week, it was wide open, and the very first thing I thought of was a FAT table. That’s an example of RAS, the Redundant Acronym Syndrome, as the T in FAT is Table. Just as you don’t need to say “ISBN number” because the N is number. I only learned of RAS while thinking of how I wanted to talk to you about this, so thank you.

FAT is a File Allocation Table. I have not one thin clue whether this still exists, but back in the day, the FAT was an important part of storage. You’d get these spinning hard drives with their magnetic platters and they could store data, but they needed organising. If you know all this, you know that I’m either patronisingly simplifying everything or I’ve just plain forgotten most of it, but I thought of the FAT as a contents page, or maybe an index. Nobody cares. Except I found it interesting because of two aspects, starting with how if you erased an entire hard drives, you probably did no such thing. You erased the contents page.

This is how data can, or at least could, be recovered. It would all be still there, until it was overwritten, it’s just that without an entry in the FAT, you couldn’t find it.

Then, reaching further back into my head, there was a thing I thought about too much regarding how data was saved on these drives. Your documents were saved in blocks and there was a thing about the size of those blocks. If your documents was a single byte longer than the block, it was given two blocks. Which meant you can have a drive that was full, even though it wasn’t.

I do not know why that interests me so. Except this week, actually starting mid-morning last Friday, I had all this space ahead of me and while I’d plenty to do, it had no structure. And I floundered. It was nice floundering, I spent Saturday morning in a cinema entirely on my own — I saw the French film “Colours of Time” and relished it, but wish I’d had more Malteasers — and then wandering about in the sunshine, I liked not having to be anywhere.

But I had all these things to do and without a structure, I was worried that they wouldn’t get done. They didn’t get done. Not all of them, and not the various other things that came up as good things to get done at the same time. A lot did. A lot was good.

Yet so much wasn’t done. And I found that if I finished something but it took a minute or two over an hour, it was clearly now time for lunch.

I appear to need a FAT table in my life. And this is not a comment on how much pizza I ate.