A while back, I related an occurrence in my day…

“I just got a call from ‘Ben’ at ‘Appall sek-yoor-rah-tee’. Ben says my computer is ‘sending a vi-russ ah-lert to the main serrrverrr’. He seemed concerned.
I asked Ben; ‘What server – where?’
(pause)
‘Noo-Jerrzee’
‘Is that where you are, Ben?’
(click)

As Jules Feiffer says in his clever play ‘Little Murders’; ‘If they’re that easy to destroy, you have to ask yerself if yer gonna miss’em when they’re gone.’

Waitaminnit!
What if Ben’s tellin’ the truth? Maybe my Dell elected Trump!
……I anticipated a sleepless night……”

Well, it was.

So, I got up this morning, blearily called one of my geekier friends, and we investigated the Dell. Yes, before you ask, we notified James Comey of the impending investigation.

On the hard drive we discovered;

• 331 emails from Hilary Clinton – mostly recipes and ambiguous limericks.
• Snatches of Noel Coward lyrics from unpublished songs – not so ambiguous, but quaint.
• A video of Citizen Trump in a Russian hotel room (sign on the door in the background stating room rates and check-out times in Cyrillic) – definitely un-ambiguous.
• An offer to forgive my student loan in exchange for a small deposit – who says this is not a kind world? It almost makes me wish I had ever had a student loan.
• An interactive map of coffee houses in Raqqa.
• George Martin’s next installment in The Game of Thrones.
• An offer to forgive my still non-existent student loan for thirteen bananas and a big rubber snake.
• The football playbook of Davidson University.
• The rest of Coleridge’s “Xanadu.”
• Lesson plans from the University of North Carolina (these were just blank pages).

I felt pretty good when we had finished. Our discoveries were bizarre and vaguely unsettling but that seems de rigeur in today’s world. I couldn’t see anything that suggested my computer moccasins had scuffed the planet any more than others I could name.

Thus encouraged, we explored further; actually opening the box of the pc.

Oh my…

We found;

• Al Capone’s whiskey bottle.
• A floppy drive (no, my younger friends, this is not something Viagra can fix).
• Nixon’s missing eighteen-and-a-half minutes.
• 14 pounds of cat and dog hair.
• The Maltese Falcon.
• A chord, previously mislaid.
• Pluto (the former planet, not the pup).

Though it seemed we could go on quite a bit further, we stopped there. As intriguing as our discoveries were, they seemed benign compared to what I could see 24/7/365 on CNN under the heading of “Breaking News”.

Also, I was feeling a bit antsy proceeding in this wonderland without Carl Sagan or Joseph Campbell as a guide…or maybe Allan Quartermain.

I did want to call Ben at “Appall sek-yoor-rah-tee” and thank him for opening a hidden world to me.

Is this how the archaeologists of the future will spend their time? If so, perhaps the City of Lexington’s computer dump facility on Versailles Road will be the Egyptian pyramids of the 22^nd century.

Cool.

Please file this under “alternative facts”.