The Case of the Laptop Ghost

The three dots didn’t look menacing when they suddenly appeared beneath my cursor. I watched as the dots changed to the word “the.” Then more dots appeared and changed into words like “bank,” “of,” “bang,” and “for.” When the name “Clinton” appeared, I thought VIRUS. I invoked my virus checker that searched my laptop for two hours before reporting “no virus found.” No more mysterious words appeared on my screen that day.

Three days later, I was updating a web page using Netscape Composer when my telephone rang. During my five-minute conversation, a dozen lines of random words appeared on the screen. This time, however, the random words contained clues. “Rain” and “cool” were among the words, and, indeed, the current weather was rainy and cool. My computer was acting as a two-thousand dollar barometer.

As the sky thundered outside my window, my computer suddenly displayed the words “rock,” “round,” and “clock,” not precisely the words sung by the deceased “King of Rock and Roll,” but enough to suggest that Elvis was channeling messages from the hereafter through my laptop. I had always thought chubby cherubs playing harps would fill heaven. I adjusted my mental image of heaven to include an Elvis playing a guitar.

Suddenly, the words “bush” and “bang” appeared on my screen, as if I had intercepted a terrorist message. I don’t want the CIA to find such messages on my disk drive, so I shut down my wireless network, but random words continued to appear on the screen.

The next set of words reminded me of my Aunt Jane, who talked nonstop her entire life. My family believed the only reason Uncle Bill remained married to Aunt Jane was because he secretly turned off his hearing aid whenever they were alone together. Now, my computer was displaying words from the life and times of dear departed Aunt Jane, a potentially gigantic volume of words that would easily fill up my disk storage many times over.

My laptop was becoming more fascinating than the Osbourne family of cable TV. But, then I discovered that the built-in microphone was turned on, and the words appearing on the screen correlated with the words and background noises in my office. My computer was a “reverse verbal Rorschach test, interpreting environmental sounds as if they were words.

I turned the microphone off. No more weather forecasts, no more terrorist messages and no Elvis songs. Aunt Jane was blissfully silent again. Who would have thought that so much work and research on speech recognizers almost opened a channel to the hereafter? Alas, as I type this column, there is no ghost in my laptop the clock for Clinton or rock the for block from bush …

The Case of the Pasta Pesto

Goose bumps appeared on my skin as I listened to my office answering machine replay a conversation between my wife and myself that had taken place in a public restaurant earlier that day. Who could have recorded this private conversation? Why did they replay it to my answering machine? What did they want? And, why monitor our discussion about Italian food?

Earlier that day my wife had used her cell phone to call me at work to invite her to lunch at our favorite Italian restaurant. During lunch, she apparently bumped her cell phone, which redialed my office telephone number and when I didn’t answer, connected to my answering machine. My office answering machine answered the call and carefully recorded our entire discussion about the insalada misto and pasta pesto.

Cell phones that call pre-established numbers and leave recording of private conversations. Speech recognizers in laptops that convert your conversations to text. A conspiracy theorist could dream up all kinds of frightening scenarios. These two cases presented intriguing high-tech mysteries, but in this case, without cloak and dagger conspiracies…you think?