From The Efforts Of Many, One Kick-Butt Punchline

Yesterday I had a bit of tampering with my school laptop. That's how I see it, anyway. A piece disappeared, and the mouse and number pad were plugged in to different hole thingies, resulting in the number pad looking like he had drawn his last breath. Oh, and the fluorescent light over my desk went kaput, and my clock stopped at 1:50 a.m. All in a night's work for somebody, I suppose.

My first thought was that an insider was pranking me. I went straight to Arch Nemesis and flat-out asked her if, perhaps, she had borrowed my laptop after school. She borrowed it once before when I was out sick several years ago. Besides, she works an after school program, PLUS she has a master key. Uh huh. I hear all of your CSI minds a-hummin'. While I am hummin' Baba O'Riley "...mmm blah blah teenage wasteland..."

Archie, however, denied any wrongdoing. I believed her. She is nothing if not direct. Once caught, she will confess and pat herself on the back for her stealthy outsmartyness. I pushed it a bit further, to see if she would crack under greater pressure.

"Oh, and while you weren't in my room messing with my laptop, did you, perhaps, climb on a chair and disable the light over my desk?" I knew that she had not, because it went out while I was there.

"Now that, I DID do. Heh, heh. But seriously. Did you hear what I did to Mrs. NotACook?"

I had not. But I was about to hear the sordid tale. Seems that Archy needed to borrow a laptop a couple days before my vandalismization. She asked NotACook, who was away from her room doing class-within-a-class duties. We both know that NotACook is even more tech incompetent than I. NotACook agreed. With conditions.

"Can you do that? I've never had it off that black thing. Do you know how to take it off without breaking it?"

Archy assured her that she could. She removed the laptop from the dock and used it for a class period. At the end, she made a bit of mischief before returning it.

"Her laptop was just like the day it came from the factory. Blue screen. No screen saver."

I nodded a knowing nod. Without revealing that mine, too, had the blue screen and no fancy add-ons.

"So I installed three screen savers. The first one looked like NotACook's blue screen, but it had a big crack across it. The next one was a group of, um...Christmas men. The third one was a fluffy feel-good Christmas screensaver. I told NotACook that I had put her laptop back. She asked if it was okay, and I told her yes. That she should check it out. I followed her into her room. She logged on and I waited."

NotACook said it looked fine. I saw that screensaver pop up. 'LOOK! It's broken!' That didn't phase her. She acted like it was nothing. So I fiddled with it like I was going to fix the crack. I put the Christmas Men on there. When they popped up, NotACook almost hyperventilated. She loud-whispered to get that off of there. So I did. And the fluffy one came up, and she said nothing. I told Mr. Principal the story. At lunch the next day, he asked her if she knew why the Tech Guy had called and told him she had inappropriate material on her laptop. She was flustered, but told him it wasn't her fault. Now she's paranoid."

This morning as The Pony and I navigated T-Hoe onto the road beside school to get to the back parking lot, I saw NotACook walking back and forth down the sidewalk on the front side of the building. The sidewalk that runs in front of my room and hers, with a small expanse of grass between the sidewalk and the building. I couldn't wait to tell Arch Nemesis that not only had she driven NotACook to laptop pr0n, but that she had apparently sent her over the edge, on the way to ruin, as evidenced by her new hobby of streetwalking.

NotACook went down the hall and I motioned her over. "I know what you did. First you put a naughty screensaver on your laptop, and the next thing I know, you're out walking the street."

"Oh, you heard about my laptop! Ha ha. I wasn't walking the street. I thought I saw a pill bottle out my window, and I knew we couldn't leave something like that laying in the grass. So I went looking for it. But it was only a mints container."

Sometimes, people hand you a punchline on a silver platter, with a food dome keeping it fresh. "So you mean that not only are you a pr0n downloader AND a streetwalker, but you're also a drug-seeker?"