Monday, December 12, 2011

I Wrote a Text Message for the Aliens- Does anybody know their number?

The problem with my microwave is that it beeps five times. It annoys me more than the rotting smell that sometimes pervades my kitchen due to the terrible plumbing in my building or the way my cat sits against the wall and locks her unwavering stare on me with her unremitting eyes, without blinking, for indefinite periods of time.

In addition to beeping five times (instead of four or six or one), it doesn't stop beeping even when you open the door or hit clear. In fact, I firmly believe that I could take a sledgehammer and smash it into tiny, tiny pieces, and it would still finish all five beeps. Other people believe that if you gave a family of monkeys a typewriter and convinced them to bang on the keys, eventually they would produce the works of Shakespeare- bound in leather, of course.

The funny thing is, if you add Evolution into mix, a monkey of sorts named William did produce the works of Shakespeare--he just did it after he technically was not classified as a monkey, and with a quill pen instead of a typewriter.

Last night, I was grumpy.
So was my phone. Or, as it said, "FGERUMPY."

My cell phone and I were having the sort of evening where you break glasses, spill beverages, and have to dig through the trash to pull out something which you should not have thrown away; and, after having a large amount of juice poured all over it, my phone was not feeling very amiable. It was feeling so irritable it decided to translate all of my texts into Azerbaijanese. How? you ask. Simple, by adding a 'z' everytime I typed 'a', an 'r' to every 'e', an 'f'' to every 'g', and some weird combination of 'b', 'v', and 'c'. In addition, instead of exclamation points, I could only type upside down question marks.

My text to Dave, explaining why I was fgerumpy, looked something like this:
"I beroker az glazss, fgot chocolazter on my paznts, threrw azwazy az pererfgerctly fgood pazckazfger aznd spillered juicer on ERVBERERY THINFG so now my phoner wont stop azddinfg as aznd zs aznd es eznd rs im fgoinfg to fgo inlsazner¿b¿b¿b seriously? upsider down querstion mazerk? ¿b?¿b¿b¿b noooo (thoser ¿b wererer suupposerd to bver erxclazmaztion points. so mazny azazazazazaz hazhazhazhazh¿b¿b¿b kill mer now."
That last bit was supposed to be "hahahaha!!! kill me now."

This text could be very important, crucial even, to the development of human civilization. A cell phone zaps the information being sent to the nearest cell phone tower. If monkeys can write Shakespeare, then I could be, purely by accident, writing a message in an alien language. And if my call were to be intercepted by, say, a radio signal being sent to outer space, then perhaps it would get beamed all the way to another planet and received by an alien civilization.

Perhaps my message says, "Hugs and kisses! Miss and love you! -Earth". Or perhaps it actually means,  "Doom on you!"

Either way, first alien contact could be all my fault. Let's just hope they're nice.

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