abode acrobat . net

When my brother was driving across Australia, he wrote an infamous email about changing the carburettor on his vehicle. While such a story is of dubious public interest, it is an integral part of any arduous journey. I hate to waste anyone’s life, but here is my equivalent tale.

Colin-from-work very kindly donated a laptop lock so that I would be able to chain my computer to a bed, park bench, or other fixed object. This worked very well until two seemingly innocuous events turned things around. First, I hung one of the two keys around the room key chain of a hostel in San Francisco, and then forgot to take it off when I checked out of there. Not a problem of course, because there was a spare - which was immediately promoted to the role of primary key. Secondly, while ‘catching the waves’ in San Diego (alright, building sand castles on the beach), I managed to lose the remaining key at a time when the laptop was chained to the bed. Hence non-technical computer problem.

The internet turned up a video showing how the lock could be easily forced using a toilet roll. Sounds simple, but after five hours spent without the Californian sunshine, fiddling around with toilet paper, I finally got the joke (which is that you can’t in reality open the lock with toilet paper). For humour’s sake, I added a comment to the video saying how it worked first time - it would be wrong not to make others struggle too.

Following a brief attempt to gnaw through the cable, I went to the hardware shop to buy some bolt cutters. They were a snip at $10 (get it!).

Anyway, San Diego’s really nice apparently.

Actually, Ben emerges as the hero in his carburettor story, bravely exposing fraudulent mechanics. I was arguably a bit of a fool, and the lock head is still stuck in the laptop so the saga continues…