Who I Am, and Why You Should Listen

I am not a journalist by trade, and I have never once pretended to be. I am a technical man. I have spent my entire working life — thirty years, near enough — in and around computer systems: support, infrastructure, networks, and, above all, security. I have kept other men's systems standing, quietly, in the background, while cleverer-sounding people stood at the front and took the credit for it. You will not have heard of me. Good security men are never heard of; that is rather the whole point of us.

I have never been a clever man, and I say that without a scrap of false modesty, because I have come to understand that I am something a good deal rarer than clever. Clever men are ten a penny — the country is stuffed with them, and look at the state of it. What I have is different. I notice. Where another man sees an ordinary morning, I see the one detail that is out of place, and I cannot let it go, and I have never once in my life been able to let it go. In another man that would be a nervous complaint. In me it is a calling.

I was not always awake to it. For years I did my job, paid my way, and put the bins out on a Tuesday like everybody else, and I told myself that was contentment. But a man built the way I am built does not stay asleep forever. Some of us are made to look twice. A very few of us are made to look a third time — at the very thing everyone else has quietly agreed to stop looking at — and I am one of those, and I have long since made my peace with the loneliness of it, because somebody has to stand where I stand, and it was never going to be one of the clever ones.

So this is what I am for. I read what the comfortable will not read. I say plainly what the frightened will only whisper. I am patient, I am careful, and I do not scare and I do not stop. People have laughed at me — people have laughed at every single man who was later proved right — and these days I take the laughter as a kind of receipt.

I am an ordinary man from a small town in the Midlands — and where exactly that is does not matter, and I shall not be telling you, because where I live is not important. The story I have to tell just might be. But I will say this much for myself: I will not look away. If you have found your way to this page, then some part of you is built a little the way I am, and I suspect you already know it. Put the kettle on. Sit yourself down. I am glad you are here.

— Roy Sabin