Miss Anachronism: An Update

So, when I last wrote, which was too long ago, I wrote about my experiences on the bus. A number of you have inquired after Miss Anachronism, or Miss Ana, to see how she is getting on. I am happy to report an interesting development. Miss Ana was last spotted on the bus with her extraordinary laptop covered in plastic. As you can imagine, this sent my mind racing. What could Ana be up to? Plastic-wrapped laptops have not been the standard or the norm EVER. And as we all know, Miss Ana does not leap into technology change willy nilly. Is Miss Ana switching from luddite to innovator? Well, that seems far fetched. Here are some thoughts as to what is driving the plastic-wrapped laptop.

Firstly, I have always viewed Miss Ana as something of a mystical personage. So, my mind immediately leapt to an end-of-days scenario presaged by Miss Ana’s unexpected choice of wrapping her laptop in plastic. One thing being discussed widely in Seattle is an impending earthquake called the “The Really Big One.” The New Yorker magazine reported that if this earthquake happens as predicted it would trigger a massive tsunami that would essentially wipe out Seattle. Perhaps, Miss Ana was not keen on this bit of moisture disturbing the inner workings of her massive laptop. However, it is uncharitable to suggest Miss Ana thinks plastic would repel “a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall.” I would not want to conflate Luddism with naïveté. So, the “The Really Big One” can’t be the explanation.

So, jumping to the other extreme, I thought more along prosaic lines. As many of you might have heard, it rains in Seattle sometimes. But, Seattle rain tends to be more a drizzle than a downpour, or a “pelo de gato” as they say in Costa Rica (or “cat hair,” which makes perfect sense). So, a wee bit of plastic around one’s computer might just do the trick. But, that does not wash either. In fact, Seattle has been an uncharacteriscally dry place this year. I suppose that’s all relative, but we have not had a lot of rain. Since the plastic-wrapped computer’s appearance coincided with such dry weather, I am guessing Miss Ana’s painstaking wrapping of her computer cannot be down to rain protection either.

The atypically dry Seattle weather perhaps yields another hypothesis. It has been hot by our standards here this year. We generally don’t have air conditioning, so when it gets above 80 degrees here things get a little bit untenable. We start to worry that we’ll be immediately dehydrated and that our soggy feet will dry and the webs that are developing between our toes will stop our being the first amphibious humans in history. So, drastic measures are always acceptable in these circumstances. Maybe Miss Ana is taking her laptop swimming to keep from drying out. Or she may be running through the sprinklers with her laptop. You might say that’s preposterous, who would take their computer swimming or to run through the sprinklers. But, I’ll answer you this way, anyone committed enough to bring the equivalent of a “Radio Flyer” wagon on the bus to transport this computational behemoth (Miss Ana’s computer) has some serious commitment to taking her machine wherever she goes. So, it is not on that matter of practicality that I waver in my hypothesis. The real problem with the pool theory is that her laptop would sink her if she’s on one of the those floating pool chairs. Very dangerous. The fatal flaw in the sprinkler theory is that running through sprinklers might require a forklift to keep the laptop mobile. So, perhaps I am nowhere on understanding the mystery of the plastic-wrapped laptop.

I genuinely welcome thoughts. But, in any case, I was sure you would all want to be apprised of this development. Until next time, which will surely be a switch back to very serious cogitations.