Tires screeched in my driveway. Someone pounded at my front door. WTF, I thought, slipping the custom 9 mm magnum auto cabriolet pistol stuffed with an oversize clip of depleted uranium bullets I keep in my bedroom into the silk-lined holster sewed into the tight, wide band of the full cammo Canadian commando jumpsuit that I having hanging in the closet. Fortunately, I didn’t have to shoot anyone – it was my dear sister Rose, totally beside herself.
“Tom,” she screamed, “my life is disintegrating before my eyes!”
“Say what?” I responded, totally nonplussed, as she crumbled into my arms, sobbing.
“It’s… it’s… it’s… ” she exclaimed, and then promptly fainted.
When women faint, dear reader, they signify. It is a great and momentous semiotic act, for a woman to faint. There are many implications to it, in most situations, but extensive experience had taught me that the act of my sister Rose fainting is not to be excessively construed. Rose is a total drama queen, and thus, I processed her semiotic in the spirit of the children’s fable “the boy who cried wolf.” How bad could it be, after all?
Well, when I revived her, I found out how bad it was, and, I must confess, if I had known the particulars, I would have been much more concerned. Over yet another cup of Indonesian civet cat coffee, she told a tale most interesting, indeed.
“I… you know, Tom, I usually teach grades one through six,” she muttered, staring down at the granite kitchen island table top, “but I have a friend, Fran, she’s a middle school teacher…” Rose shivered as she took another sip of coffee. “And she got pregnant. So, it was like me and several other teachers, who usually teach other grades, we all volunteered to substitute teach for her, when, you know,…”
“It came time for that period between where her water broke and the little snapper popped out,” I volunteered.
“Yeah,” she said, having at the coffee again, “that was it. You know, the water breaks, then hubby and the wife go to the hospital, and… who knows? Maybe the baby comes out, maybe it doesn’t. If it takes a while, then the doctors start talking about inducing labor, because they want to go home, I guess…”
“Or play golf,” I suggested, “or meet with their stock brokers. “Their time is extremely valuable, after all. They are little tin gods – or so the American Medical Association and prime time television would have us believe. ‘Sure,’ they say, ‘Come on, shoot some oxytocin in her and get this over with, we have better things to do.’”
“Yeah, they’re scum bags, Tom, I know,” she sobbed, “Do I have to remind you that I’ve had six children? But that’s not it… What happened was, I was substituting for Fran when she was in the hospital, having the baby. It was a social studies class. The curriculum unit was the feminist movement of the nineteen sixties. Part of the lesson was role reversal.”
“Sounds like the kind of crap they teach in social studies these days instead of the Constitution,” I grumbled, sounding, I noticed, like a guy about forty years older than I am, and stopping for a moment to wonder why. Maybe being awakened so abruptly from dreaming my pleasant little bachelor’s dreams had added a few decades to my grumpiness factor. Yeah, I recalled, casting my gaze reflectively at the ceiling, weren’t Cerise, Peekaboo and I just about to…
“Sure, it’s crap,” Rose interjected, interrupting my reverie, “but half of what we teach them these days is crap. Stuff to increase their sense of self-esteem, stuff to indoctrinate them with politically correct attitudes. Stuff that would make the nuns back at St. Vitus’ break out their heavy duty steel rulers and look for some knuckles to crack.”
“Oh, yeah,” I agreed, unconsciously rubbing my left hand as I spoke, “no way Sister Mary de Sade would have put up with any of that nonsense.”
“The study unit was going as expected,” Rose stuttered, “until one of the girls wanted to reverse the role reversal.” Rose collapsed, wracked by heaving sobs. When her convulsions finally ceased, she looked up at me, her mascara having inscribed two ghastly black streaks down her cheeks. “This kid – Tom, she pulled my skirt and panties down.”
“What!” I exclaimed, nearly spilling my snifter of B&B, “that’s – that’s – it’s ridiculous, that’s what it is.”
“We engaged in the work book dialog,” Rose continued, “but when my line was ‘If I said you have a nice body, would you hold it against me?’ she pushed on my left hip…”
“Excellent leverage point, that…” I observed. Rose slapped my face.
“No, really,” I retorted, rubbing my cheek, “so nice and wide, and such long legs – like a good brood mare.”
BANG! I got another one on the other side. Little brothers of the world – UNITE – you have nothing to lose but the unending pleasure of teasing your big sisters!
“Damn it, Tom!” Rose was livid – “That skanky pubescent slut took me by surprise – she turned me around and pulled my skirt and panties down before I knew what was happening! In front of the whole class! And they all laughed while she did it!”
“That’s why I say they should pay middle school teachers extra money,” I observed. “As far as I’m concerned, nobody in their right mind ought to be in the same room with thirty fourteen year old humans, much less try to teach them anything. I think, once they get out of the sixth grade, we ought to just take them to some kind of open-air park where we deliver food and they run around naked. Let them try to out-do ‘Lord of the Flies.’ After they get all that out of their systems, then they can enroll in high school. Nobody remembers anything they learned in middle school anyway, in my humble opinion,” I observed, sipping my snifter, “aside from how to successfully place Super Glue on Mother Superior’s office chair, I sure as hell don’t.”
“It’s not that simple,” Rose persisted, “one of her class mates recorded the entire incident on his cell phone video camera, and day before yesterday, it was posted on YouTube!”
“Okay, so, in the course of your career as a juvenile educator, instead of being subjected to utter humiliation within the context of your local school, you have been subjected to humiliation at the mercy of an audience of billions,” I philosophized, “what, in the final analysis, at the end of the day, et cetera, is the difference?”
Rose drained her coffee and gestured for another, which I quickly provided, spiked with a shot of Grand Mariner and accompanied with a fresh, cool and creamy eclair from Tivoli’s in Rosslyn; which Rose, being a healthy and robust woman in a condition of extreme stress, devoured in a trice, regaining, as I anticipated, a significant measure of her usual composure.
“Yes. I see what you mean, Tom,” she replied, gazing at me through my great grandmother’s exquisite, doe-like eyes, “do you have another eclair?”
Of course I did. “What happened to the kid who pulled your skirt and panties down?” I asked as I handed over another eclair, adding “this one has almond-flavored custard.”
“Suspended from school for the rest of the year,” Rose replied, taking her first taste of the almond custard eclair, “I’ll give the school administration credit for that, anyway. They came down on her like a ton of bricks.”
“So,” I remarked, preemptively helping myself to the last eclair before Rose could finish her current one and ask me for it, “sounds to me like justice was served. What’s all the fuss about?”
“The kid who posted the video on YouTube, dummy!” Rose was clearly irritated that I didn’t already see that.
“Well, what about him?” I shot back, taking a small, protective bite of my eclair – Rose never, ever asks for a bite of anyone’s food once they have taken a bite of it themselves.
“He turned out to be one of those – what do they call them? A cyber… cyber-bum, no… a cyber-bully,” Rose said, taking a second petulant bite of her second eclair. “He posted the video and then sent out emails all over with the, what’s it – the underlined thingy you click on…”
“The link,” I offered, chasing the territorial bite of my eclair with a sip of B&B, “the URL.”
“Yeah,” Rose nodded, “the link to the video in it. Then those emails got sent around, and now every kid in the school has seen the video and who knows – what, millions of other people have seen it! It really, really burns me up, Tom – here’s this video on YouTube stating my name and the school’s name, but the identity of the person who put the video there is nowhere to be found. When I showed it to Hank, he went nuts, and when I told him I had no idea which child in the class did it, he went totally ballistic. The next day he was down at the middle school demanding an investigation.”
“How did that go over,” I asked, sweetening up my B&B – I always use equal amounts of straight Benedictine and my choice of brandy, BTW, a combination I find much better than the bottled stuff – “any action from the principal’s office?”
“They said they had questioned all the students in that class and had no evidence strong enough to constitute a basis for discipline,” Rose sighed.
“Oh, so the little bastards are covering for each other,” I mused. “Of course they know who did it; everybody knew I put the Super Glue on Mother Superior’s office chair, but nobody ever spilled that – and that was, what, fifteen years before the Web. I bet the school administration’s position went over great with Hank.”
Rose smiled slightly as she remembered. “They had to call the cops to make him leave. I guess it shows how much he cares about me.”
“I never had any doubt about that, Rose,” I said, patting her hand reassuringly “it’s just that he’s such a dumb Polack sometimes.”
Rose started laughing and crying at the same time. “Oh, yeah, I know – I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet! Hank Junior finds out about it and hacks YouTube, then determines the poster’s, what do you call it… ip… ippy… eye-P something….”
“The poster’s IP address,” I offered. Rose nodded agreement. “Let me guess the rest – Hank Junior traced the IP address to its Internet service provider, then hacked the ISP database to get the name and address.”
“I guess so, something like that,” Rose said, a bit proudly, “Hank Junior is a pretty smart kid.”
“Who apparently doesn’t mind breaking a slew of federal telecommunications laws to protect his mother’s dignity,” I commented dryly, “which, I suppose, means he’s got his heart in the right place. So what happened then?”
“Well,” Rose continued, “it just so happens that the kid lives in a nearby neighborhood. So Hank and I drive over to the house and confront the kid’s father with the whole thing. But instead of bawling out his son and making him take the video down off YouTube, the kid’s father gets mad at us for invading his son’s privacy. He was like ‘My son did nothing more than record what happened, and if he wants to put his videos from school on YouTube, that’s his prerogative.’”
“Since when,” I wondered, “did teenage punks like that kid have prerogatives?”
“Since his father heard the word on Larry King, I guess,” Rose speculated.
“I wouldn’t have minded having some prerogatives when I was his age, that’s for sure,” I replied, fantasizing briefly about which “exclusive or special rights, powers, and privileges” would have been appropriate for someone attending the eighth grade. “You know, there’s all these lunatics running around yelling about how we have to protect children from the Internet, when it looks like what we really need is some way to protect us from children who get their grubby mitts on a Web browser.”
“Sometimes I wish the Internet had just stayed the way it used to be,” Rose wished futilely, “you know, something that only nerdy scientists, computer geeks and people like you knew about.”
“I sort of miss those days myself,” I admitted, “it was a lot more civilized, that’s for sure. I’m pretty sure we could have gotten along quite well without spam, cookie trojans, dog fight sites, iron-man fight sights, chicken fight sights, girl-fight sites, police beat-down sites, spyware, on-line shopping sites, corporate shill sites, fake term paper sites, gambling sites, used car sites, sports betting sites, virus attachments, terrorist sites, hate speech sites, worms, yammering political blog sites and YouTube, of course, not to mention sixty-five million porn sites.”
“Definitely YouTube,” Rose lamented.
“Hell, twenty decent porn sites would have been plenty,” I sighed wistfully.
“So, anyway,” Rose continued, “I could see we weren’t getting anywhere with this guy and I dragged Hank out of there before anything bad could happen. Then, today, I sent Hank to Home Depot to pick up some tiles I ordered for the upstairs bathroom floor and he runs into the kid’s father in the remodeling department. They got in a huge fight – both of them were arrested for assault and disturbing the peace.”
And, after all that, my sister’s hooch was still on YouTube. I began thinking. “Are these people planning any family vacations any time soon?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah,” Rose said, giving me that look she always does when she knows I’m up to something, “Hank Junior knows the other kid’s best friend – they’re both on the same soccer team. He even mentioned it to me tonight at dinner. That little brat’s family are leaving Thursday night for a three-day weekend in North Carolina, visiting the wife’s mother.”
I nodded curtly, got up, went into my study and returned to the kitchen with a set of lock picks. “Buy a box of Fanny Farmer candy,” I said, handing her the lock picks, “and pick Hank Junior up during lunch at school tomorrow. Drive by the place – tell Hank Junior to walk up to the front door with the candy box. If anyone opens it, he should try to sell them the box of candy to buy uniforms for his soccer team. Otherwise, all he should do is take a good look at the lock on the front door and determine what make and model it is. Then take him to Home Depot and have him select the five locks they have which most closely resemble the one on the brat’s front door. Then drop Hank Junior back off at school. Then you go to the drug store and buy some ecezma lotion. Once Hank Junior can open all five locks with these, give me a call. Have him practice doing it while wearing some of those rubber gloves you wear when you do housework, so he won’t leave any fingerprints. This one right here,” I explained, showing her the rake pick, “it works about eighty percent of the time, particularly if you aren’t worried about breaking the lock. Just lean on the latch knob and run it back and forth until the lock gives way. Under no circumstances should Hank Junior set foot in that house. He should just pick the front door lock and leave. He shouldn’t even open the door after he picks the lock; and make sure he wears the gloves when he does it. Have him bring the candy, too, just in case somebody comes to the door – same story, he’s selling it for soccer team uniforms. Anybody asks about the gloves, he says has ecezma; anybody makes him take them off – oh, wow, that ecezma lotion really worked good, and Mom has a tube of it back home in case they want to see it.”
“Thanks, Tom,” Rose sobbed, drying her eyes again. She was still pretty upset when she left, but I could see she felt better already.
I got right to work, breaking out my special Wi-Fi equipped laptop and hopping into my car. This particular laptop is outfitted with a Pringles antenna, which, although invented nearly ten years ago, is still the best way to WAR drive. I did a little bit of that in the up-and-coming suburb of Herndon, Virginia, a place just chock-a-block with small-to-medium-sized IT firms, mostly staffed by people who think they know a lot more about computers than they actually do. It didn’t take me long to locate an unsecured wireless network, log in as the administrator, set up an email account and use the email address to create a new user account on Craigslist Community Classifieds. Then I drove home and went back to bed.
About nine o’clock Wednesday evening, Rose called.
Rose: Hank Junior says he managed to solve all five of those puzzles.
Tom: Great. Have him stop by early Friday and solve the original.
Rose: Right.
In such situations, there’s no point in saying too much on the telephone, of course. Waiting until the wee small hours of Thursday morning, I grabbed my special laptop again, drove back over to Herndon, logged in to that unsecured network and accessed the Internet, going to http://washingtondc.craigslist.org where, using my new user account, I posted a message under several appropriate categories. It went like this:
The Rapture is coming! It will arrive at 11:47 p.m. on Friday the 13th. We are leaving this Vale of Tears before the Tribulation strikes the unfaithful. In order to assure our righteousness, we offer all we have to you. Come to our home Friday, April 13th and take whatever you want – take the appliances, the furniture, the beds, the plumbing, the wiring, the rugs, the pictures on the walls, the clothes, the toys, the computers, the food, the cabinets, the plates, the sliver ware, the pots, the pans, the bookcases, the bathtubs, the toilets – even the kitchen sink! Take everything we have left there, it is all yours, free of charge! Praise Jesus, we will not need any of it in Heaven! Hallelujah!
Then I left the address, along with convenient directions to the place from all points of the compass, making sure to include important starting destinations such as Anacostia, Alexandria, Northeast DC, Silver Spring, Hagerstown, Frederick, Baltimore and Richmond, all of which I got from www.mapquest.com.
Then, in order that all the post-Communist, as well as the major third, fourth, fifth and sixth world immigrant groups, that, for the most part, illegally infest the greater Washington Metro area, have an opportunity to read it in their native tongue, whether indigenous or colonial, assuming that they can read, I posted the entire thing again. I posted it in Spanish, French, Farsi, Hindi, Pashtu, Urdu, Arabic, Punjabi, Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese, Amharic, Cambodian, Malay, Dari, Uzbeki, Swahili, Yoruba, Xhosa, Wolof, Tagalog, Russian, Ukrainian, Albanian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovak, Korean and Portuguese. To accomplish this, I used babelfish.altavista.com and a few other such resources readily available on the Web if you just search, dear reader, on the term “translate,” at www.google.com – or at any of a number of the Internet’s other fine search engines – all of which, BTW, you can find by going to www.google.com and entering the terms “search” and “engine.” It only took a few minutes, because I’d prepared the files beforehand and used a script to load them into the message fields.
Then I closed the Web browser, deleted the email account I had created, signed off the unsecured wireless network, drove home and went back to bed.
It was on the late local news tonight – just a brief human interest piece, carried live. About five in the afternoon a neighbor had called the cops after observing a steady stream of vans and pickup trucks visiting the place all day. The brat’s Dad was there, too – he’d driven up from Raleigh just as soon as the cops had managed to locate him at his mother-in-law’s home and ask what was going on. He was, I think it is fair to say, beside himself with emotion. I recorded the entire piece for posterity, and the expression on his face is, I am sure anyone would agree, quite priceless and, given his agitated mental state, his comments on a par with Zippy the Pinhead. Indeed, the entire clip is itself worthy of posting on YouTube, and I may, in fact do that – anonymously, to be sure, as did that chip off his old block. I need to consider the ethical implications first, though.
The cops detained a couple of gentlemen carting the water heater out of the basement. It turned out they run a junk yard in the vicinity of Quantico. From them, the cops obtained a printout of the Craigslist announcement. Being conscientious, if typically clueless lawmen, they had immediately contacted Craigslist, where they were told that, without a court order or a warrant, Craigslist will not release any information concerning users who post to it. That tidbit was dutifully recited by the TV reporter at the scene, it being, as she could obviously sense, a great closing line for the story.
Of course, when the brat’s Dad finally does get a warrant, I suspect there’s going to be some bozo with an MCSE decorating his wall, working here on an H1B visa for a third-rate IT firm in Herndon who will have a lot of explaining to do. Maybe this will teach him to learn operating system security before he steals a real American’s job as a network administrator. And yeah, I know – my sister’s hooch is still up on YouTube. But who’s laughing harder now?